Hudson (Anderson Billionaires #4) - Melody Anne Page 0,30

him now.

“No, the woman who raised you died a long time ago,” Joseph said. He went quiet as he let those words sink in. Not a sound could be heard at their table. Joseph waited for Damien to ask the next question. He knew what it would be.

“The woman who raised me?” Damien finally said. “She had pictures of my father and her while she was pregnant. She had pictures of me the day I was born,” he said. He’d told Joseph that he hadn’t kept any of it. When he’d walked away from that house, he’d walked away from that life, but he could still remember the album she’d shown him over and over again. “She’d look at my birth pictures and cry.” He remembered feeling bad about how much pain he’d caused her when he’d been born.

“She was crying because the baby in those pictures wasn’t you,” Joseph explained. A gasp escaped a few of the men at the table.

“Joseph, you might want to just spit this out,” Finn said as he leaned forward. Damien polished off his beer, and Finn passed him another right before opening his own bottle.

“My Uncle Neilson had zero morals,” Joseph said. “He blamed my father and my grandfather for the destruction of his life. He wanted the company, but everyone knew he’d dismantle it and take any money he could. Many jobs would’ve been lost if that would’ve happened. So my grandfather made the very difficult decision to ask that I be put in charge of it. He knew I’d fight to the ends of the earth to keep it together. He didn’t disown Neilson, though. He’d made him offer after offer to run different companies, to help him begin his own, to help him get ahead in life. Neilson didn’t want to work for anything. That was the one unacceptable compromise to my grandfather. He’d worked hard his entire life, and he expected the same from his sons and his grandsons. It’s why I taught my own children the same work ethic, the same responsibility of helping others. It’s good to lend a hand, it’s poor parenting to ask nothing of your children.”

“So Neilson decided to throw a fit and walk away?” Damien asked. “Did he think his father would chase him down and hand him what he wanted?”

“I believe that’s exactly what he thought. But my grandfather died. And he left nothing to Neilson. The family still would’ve helped him. But he didn’t want help. He wanted all or nothing. He wasn’t going to take pennies when he thought he was worth billions. Those were his own words. And all of us in this family had worked too hard to give away something to someone not willing to earn it.”

“So where does my mother come into this?” Damien asked. “And their mother? I’m assuming we have the same father. I can see the similarity. I don’t understand how it all worked. Neilson died when I was about six months old. I don’t know exactly when it happened as my mother . . .” He paused and took a breath. “As the woman I thought was my mother didn’t give me an exact time.”

“The woman who raised you had a son who died at less than a month old. As much as I’ve searched I can’t find if it was natural, or if something nefarious happened,” Joseph said.

“What do you mean?” Noah asked.

Damien was speechless.

“Sometimes women go through serious postpartum depression and things happen. We don’t know what exactly happened in this situation. They were in a foreign country, and they didn’t file paperwork. It took the investigators a long time to find a couple who lived next to Neilson and Maria, as she was called then. This neighbor said she’d just come home with the baby and about a month later was weeping on the front porch, holding the still infant in a blanket. They left that night and weren’t seen ever again.”

“So how do I fit into this?” Damien asked. His face had gone white. He wasn’t putting the pieces together. No one could have. It was so underhanded it didn’t seem possible.

“Your birthmother, Sandra, showed up on my doorstep nearly forty years ago. You were only a few weeks old. She was scared. Her husband was missing, and she didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t home; Katherine invited her inside and pleaded with her to allow us to help. In the morning she was gone. And though