shit straight and you’re not sitting here in a funk thinking in the past.”
I sat back in my chair and stared at the woman, practically on the edge of my seat waiting for the lightning to light up the sky just so I could get a glimpse of her. My blanket that I slept with every single night was wrapped around her, and my hands were curled into fists as I stopped myself from reaching over and dragging her over to me.
“I’m not broken up about it anymore,” I murmured. “I had years in prison to come to terms with the fact that she’s gone.”
I looked down at my hands.
“But, saying that, Vanessa wasn’t really mine.”
Her sharp inhale had me glancing away from her and back to the sky.
Was I really about to say this aloud?
“What?” she breathed.
Yep, I was. I was going to do it.
“I’m not the man that got her pregnant,” I said, startling the ever-loving shit out of her.
She gasped and leaned forward. “What?”
I nodded once.
“You heard me,” I said. “The baby wasn’t mine.”
She opened her mouth and then closed it. “Wasn’t your…what?”
It was obvious that she couldn’t get her brain to wrap around my words.
The baby wasn’t his? I could practically see that thought on the edge of her lips, waiting to spill over.
He had a fiancée that was pregnant with a child that wasn’t his?
That’s pretty much why I’d kept the whole thing a secret. I knew nobody would believe me easily…but for some reason, I needed Harleigh to know that Vanessa wasn’t all that she was cracked up to be.
“About a week before Vanessa was shot, I found out that she was carrying another man’s baby,” I murmured, going into the tale that had practically ruined me.
I heard the swing creak as she pushed herself off and started to rock it slowly with one toe.
“How’d you find out?” she asked curiously.
I took a sip of my coffee, loving the bitter taste as it slid down my throat.
“I was at the house” —I gestured to the house behind me— “working on some final stuff that we had to work on. I was already living here, doing repairs in my spare time. But since the bathroom was still in disrepair, she chose to live at her apartment until we could get it fixed.”
Harleigh made a moaning sound from her seat.
I grinned and looked back over at her. “It’s not one of those stories…at least…not yet.”
She made a sound in the back of her throat and went back to drinking her coffee. Though I couldn’t see her face since the particular seat she’d chosen was in mostly shadows, I knew that her eyes were on me.
“Since I was paying her medical bills, she’d had all the paperwork for her OB/GYN sent to the new address. I went out to check the mail the day that I found out and found a couple of letters that were confusing to me. Something called a ‘quad screen’ that kind of scared the crap out of me. Another was some results from her gestational diabetes test. It said that they’d been trying to reach her by phone and couldn’t. Anyway, after I couldn’t get ahold of her by phone, I got on Google and started to research some of the things on the paper that were highlighted as abnormal. When I got to one that was what they considered a ‘dormant condition’ unless both parents carried the gene, or whatever it’s called…” I paused. “Another thing that caught my eye in the notes that were sent in the mail was a thing called RH. Have you ever heard of that?”
“Yes, why?” she wondered.
“Well, about a month or two before Vanessa wound up pregnant, there was this blood drive at work, and we got to talking about how we were both O negative. We jokingly said if something happened to either one of us, we’d be able to donate easily.” I shook my head. “Anyway, I started to research that on Google, too and found out that with both of us having the same blood type, the baby should’ve been the same blood type, too. Both of us had a negative RH factor. Only, the paperwork that I was reading said that the baby carried an RH positive factor, and that she would have to receive some injection so that if for some reason her baby’s blood would be introduced to her blood, her body wouldn’t try to fight the baby as