“Baby, he doesn’t know.” She dug in her purse and held her phone out to me. “Here, use mine and call Devlyn. Tell her everything, Morgan.”
I took the phone and moved back down the hall to my room. I looked around at the colors I’d chosen in here. Colors that made me think of Jude. Colors that made me feel close to him.
“Guess I’m redecorating this week,” I mumbled as I climbed onto my bed and called my best friend.
“Benny? Is Morgan okay?”
“I’m fine. I broke my phone,” I told her as I chewed my fingernail.
“On purpose?” she asked.
I smiled. Devlyn was the one person who knew me best.
“Who pissed you off?”
I took a deep breath and blew it out. “My husband and my brother,” I spilled, and then pulled the phone away from my ear before Devlyn pierced my eardrum with her screams.
“You got fucking married without me? And then didn’t fucking tell me?” she shouted.
“Cher? What’s wrong?” I heard Gator ask in the background.
“Oh nothing, just my best fucking friend keeping secrets from me,” she told him. “Bitch, you have five seconds to explain before I come back up there and kick your ass.”
I smiled in spite of the threat that I knew she’d carry out. “I might need more than five seconds.”
“Start at the beginning,” she ordered.
“Well...” I wasn’t sure how to start. “I need you to understand that I never wanted to keep secrets from you.”
I heard her breathing on the other end of the line. And I wondered if I was about to lose my best friend when I told her everything.
“I know who my father is. I’ve always known, but both he and my mother chose to keep it a secret to protect me.”
“Morgan Delany, is this going to sound like the plot of one of the books Henley reads?”
“MyfatherisBraesalO’Malley,” I said quickly, my words running together in one breath. When the line went quiet, I knew she’d heard everything.
“Dev?” I pulled the phone away and looked to see if she’d hung up on me. The call counter continued to tick away the seconds as I waited for her to respond. I pressed the speaker button and laid the phone on the bed. “Say something, Dev.”
“I don’t even know where to begin,” she whispered.
“I know. My life is fucked up, but it gets worse,” I admitted, letting the tears fall. “I met someone when I was in Arkansas.”
“Morgan,” Dev whispered.
“You should sit down and make sure you aren’t holding one of those babies; I wouldn’t want you to drop them.”
I told Devlyn everything.
I told her about the first time I met Jude, then meeting King and Gunner and a few others. I told her about getting pregnant and then getting married. And I told her about losing them both within a few days of each other.
“That’s why you shut down every year,” she said, her voice filled with sadness. “Morgan, you should have told me. You didn’t have to go through all that alone.”
“I wasn’t alone. I had my brother.” A pitiful chuckle slipped from my lips. “Only neither of us knew it.”
“What about your mom and dad?” she asked.
“Mom knew. I’d called her when I got married, but we never told my dad.”
