Chapter 229
Ice cream accomplished—and mostly kept off the dress by dint of unfolding a lot of napkins over the front of her neck—they headed back to Dockside.
Scooter handed off a pint of coffee crunch to Kat, who took it, looked at it, and sighed. “There is for you a certified letter on your desk,” she said. She opened the container, grabbed a spoon, and offered it back to Scooter. “It is from the medical lab.” 16
One of these days, Scooter was actually going to think about things before he had to deal with them. A little emotional pre-planning, say. Today…today was not that day.
He fell into his new desk chair heavily. “They will have sent a copy to him, too,” Scooter muttered, trying to convince himself that opening it was the rational and mature thing to do, but fuck, he didn’t want to. He did not want to see his niece’s paternity written out on the sheet. Did he even believe there was a chance that Billie wasn’t Johannson’s kid?
He picked up the brass letter opener on his desk; it had been a gift from Andy to christen the newly decorated office and if it happened to feel like a weapon in Scooter’s hand, that was just a coincidence. “Shit.” He sliced the envelope open with a quick jerk and then stared at it some more.
“I don’t want to lose her like this,” Scooter confessed, staring up at Andy, who was hovering near the end of the desk.
“We won’t,” Andy said. “We will fight it, if it comes to that. Mace didn’t want him in her life; I think that’s a perfectly reasonable argument to begin with.”
Scooter blew out all the air in his chest and waited until his lungs ached before inhaling again. He opened the envelope and unfolded the single page inside. He glanced at the chart, a lot of numbers and little purple and green circles. Even without having access to a sample of Mace’s DNA to compare, the results were pretty conclusive: 99.2%.
“Jesus,” Scooter said. He tossed the letter onto the table. He didn’t know how to say it out loud.
Andy picked it up and skimmed it, and blew out a breath. “Well, it’s not really that much of a shock, I guess. I’ll call Jess later and get her spun up; if we need to bring in specialists, she’ll know who to recommend. And I’ll have her send word to Mom’s lawyer, too. I don’t want to get my mom hysterical until we know what’s going to happen, but she’ll throw in her resources as well if it becomes necessary. I wonder if—” He stopped, looking closely at Scooter, then dropped the letter and came around the desk to catch Scooter’s face in his hands. “Baby. It’s going to be okay. We’re not going to let Simon take her away.”
Scooter nodded absently. “I want to shake the hell out of my sister,” he said. “Why the hell did she end up making a baby with Simon Johannson? I mean, really.”
“How the hell should I know? Maybe it was the shock and grief. It does strange things to people.”
Scooter scrubbed at his face with both hands. “I do not want to think about Johannson doing strange things to my sister, Andy.” Not that he had any right to criticize. It wasn’t like he hadn’t, oh, God, spent a rather loud evening up against a shop wall outside the Norva getting blown by Mark Johannson. But I was a kid. He supposed the thrill of sex, the comfort of closeness didn’t really go away when you got older. He patted Andy’s hand. It didn’t. And Mace had just as much right to it as Scooter did. “Do you believe what he said, about wanting Mace to stay with him?”
Andy made a frustrated face. “You’ve known him longer than I have. He seemedsincere, but you know how he is. He’s hard to read.”
“I…I hardly know him,” Scooter said. “Like, he’s around. Everyone knows who he is. The Johannsons are the richest family in the area.” He made a face. “They make us look like we’re struggling to get by. Their dad, George, owns hotels and casinos all up and down the coast, including one of the more lucrative places in Atlantic City. If they want her, baby, they got money to throw behind it. It’s gonna get ugly.”
Andy sighed. “Well, if we’re not willing to fight, we don’t deserve to keep her anyway. I’m not saying it’ll be easy. But my mom will throw in—you know she will—and she still owns some pretty hefty investments, not to mention the goodwill of several other families. We’ll talk to Simon, see how determined he is, and brace for the storm, and maybe we can come up with some kind of solution. But I don’t see that we’ve got any other choice; do you?”
“No, I guess not,” Scooter said. “I keep thinkin’ she’s all the blood family I got left, but then…Billie is Simon’s daughter. Is it right of us…I don’t know. This is…complicated.” He hated complicated. The core part of him wanted to wrap his arms around Billie and refuse, point blank, to give her up. Simon didn’t know her, not yet. And at the same time, how would he feel if someone was trying to keep his child away from him?
“We’ll talk to Jess,” Andy promised. “Complicated is her job. Maybe we can figure something out, even if it looks like we’ll lose custody—get them to agree to postpone the transition until she’s had a chance to get to know them, or mandate visitation with us or…something.”
Something in his chest ached, making it hard to swallow. “I love her,” he confessed. “I don’t want her to go.”
Andy’s arms wrapped around him, pulled him close. “I know, baby,” Andy breathed into his hair. “I love her, too.”
* * * *
Mommy had always said not to listen at keyholes or risk being vexed. Billie wasn’t sure whatvexedmeant, and she had never actually seen a keyhole. Keys went in slots and you couldn’t peer through them like they showed in cartoons anyway—she’d tried, she really, really had.