Page 162 of Ruthless Claim

I stare at my cousin in disbelief. “It’s that simple?”

“Ha! No, it’s not simple at all,” Emma laughs. “It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever say. But it’s what she needs to hear.”

She starts to walk away, then pauses and looks back.

“Just…be careful, Cillian. You know as well as I do that in our world, if something seems too convenient, it usually is. And this whole thing?” She inclines her head in the direction Claire had gone. “This is way too fucking convenient.”

Emma walks away, pushing Seraphina’s stroller across the grass toward the parking lot.

I sit alone on the bench, phone in hand, and let everything click into place.

The money talk. The coached questions. The timeline that didn’t quite work. The lack of resemblance.

Claire’s calculating expressions when she thought I wasn’t watching.

The way she’d touched my arm and played it off. The too-fast paternity results.

Valentina had seen it all from the beginning. She had tried to tell me. Had begged me to verify.

And I’d called her jealous. Irrational. Paranoid.

I’ve chosen my guilt and my pride over my wife.

Fuck.

The second crack comes the next day.

I’m meeting Claire at a coffee shop—her suggestion, not mine.

When I arrive, I see her through the window, sitting at a table.

She is on her phone, and her expression is different.

Harder. Almost like she’s scheming?

She doesn’t see me yet, so I hang back and watch.

I’ve found that people show you who they are in the moments before they know you’re watching. And Claire, sitting at the table with her phone in both hands, is someone I haven’t seen before.

Her face is set, hard around the jaw, focused in a way that has nothing soft or overwhelmed about it.

She’s typing something quickly, her fingers flying.

Whatever it is, it requires her full attention.

She doesn’t look up. Instead she types, reads, and types again.

I push through the door.

The movement catches her peripheral vision and she looks up. Immediately, her entire expression transforms. The hardness dissolves, replaced by that soft, slightly overwhelmed single mother persona she always wears around me.

The shift is so dramatic that I almost stop in my tracks.

“You came,” she says, smiling at me.

“I said I would.” I pull out the chair across from her and sit. Before I can stop myself, I nod toward the phone she’s turned face-down on the table. “Who was that?”

A flush moves up her throat and her hand shifts over the phone, sliding it off the table into her lap in a motion she clearly wants to look casual but doesn’t. “Oh. No one. Just—work stuff. Nothing important.”