Unluckily, by the time that I got done with work, the snow was back.
Odin gave me a ride home and informed me that I needed a new vehicle.
By the time I arrived, all the lights were off in the house still, so I didn’t try to head to Gentry’s place.
Instead, I fed Neo and fell into bed utterly exhausted.
When I woke up the next morning, there was a text message from Apollo on my screen.
Apollo:
Results are conclusive. Gentry’s not Dean’s father…Van is.
Fuck.
Twenty-Five
If I say ‘first of all,’ run.
—Sage to Gentry
Gentry
Apollo had come to talk to me around midnight last night, letting me know everything that he’d found over the last twenty-four hours.
I’d gone over to Holly and Denver’s place and had been there ever since drinking whiskey and trying to process everything that had been shared with me.
My brother, Van, had been in a throuple with two women—Brooke and Nadine.
How and why I’d never known this, I didn’t know.
What I did know was that, apparently, there was a falling out between Van, Brooke, and Nadine.
Brooke and Nadine had broken up with Van after some pretty heavy shit had gone down that I didn’t care about hearing. In retaliation, Brooke and Nadine had devised a plan. Sleep with me, and make it look like the baby that Nadine was carrying was mine.
And it’d worked.
I’d thought I had a kid. Brooke and Nadine had treated me like utter garbage to try to get back at Van. Then Van had blocked Brooke and Nadine then went on deployment, not bothering to read any of the messages from Brooke or Nadine.
Seeing as Van and I hadn’t been tight, he hadn’t realized that Nadine had her claws in me, because I hadn’t shared.
Hell, he hadn’t even made it back in time to see me before I’d gone to jail.
He’d only come to see me twice while I was in jail between deployments, and when we’d talked, the last thing I’d wanted to talk about was Dean.
Now, I was at my house, staring at the dark RV across the yard, wanting to go wake Sage up and bury myself in her.
I’d left Dean with Holly and Denver and had come home to sleep in my own bed and process what I’d learned today.
One, I didn’t have a kid.
Dean was never my child in the first place.
Two, my brother Van had a child, and he had no clue how close he’d come to not having one.
Three, I had to figure out how to get Van here.
He was a Chief Warrant Officer in the Army now.
