Page 114 of Fierce-Dane

“You’re a good kid, Tiffani,” Sloane said. “Do you think I could have a friendship hug so that we know everything is okay between us?”

Tiffani hugged his girlfriend. He looked out the window and saw Shiloh running and laughing with Tyler and told himself everything might just be okay.

33

LIST OF CONCERNS

“Thanks for meeting with me so late,” Sloane said to Zander Conway.

She’d been thankful the private investigator was willing to come to her house after she put Shiloh to bed.

She didn’t want her sister to know what was going on.

“Not a problem,” Zander said. “I don’t know everything. Only a little of what Chloe said. She was in the building the other day with Royce to look at something and said you’d be calling.”

Zander was Chloe’s husband’s best friend.

As much as she’d wanted to put some of this behind her, she didn’t have a choice.

Last week she’d gotten a call that her mother died of multiple organ failure. No other explanation as to why though.

Dane argued that they should run more tests, but she’d been told the hospital just needed to verify that since Nadine Redding died on their premises they had to ensure they weren’t liable. There was nothing to say otherwise.

Nothing that her mother’s current job she’d worked atfor three years would have attributed to heart and kidney disease, nor liver failure.

There were more questions than answers at this point.

Dane had intervened and asked that tissue and blood samples be sent to Duke and Dr. Mick McNamara would run more tests.

She’d argued she couldn’t pay for that and didn’t see that insurance would cover it.

She knew Mick was a friend of the Fierces and that Dane knew him also having met him at some wedding or another.

Dane had told her he’d take care of it without any management on either of their parts. These were special circumstances and since Shiloh was now a patient at Duke, for the little girl’s long term care, they needed to see if they could figure out what caused her young mother’s organs to fail.

It’d killed her to hear those words.

That maybe there was some hereditary issue that she or Sabrina had to worry about too.

But she had never been sick like her mother always seemed to be.

Neither had Sabrina that she could remember.

And since there were so many things up in the air regarding her mother, she had to see if she could find out anything about Shiloh’s father.

“I’m not sure I can tell you much,” she said to Zander. “I’ll give you all the documents I’ve got, which isn’t much. I don’t want Shiloh to know about this and I don’t think she could answer any questions. I’ve asked and she doesn’t recall any guy in her life. Ever.”

It wasn’t just Shiloh saying that, but Casey had said thesame thing. Her mother’s neighbor might have known more than anyone else.

The only thing she had to go by was the fact a friend gave her mother that locket, which she didn’t want to hand over to Zander but would if he could get DNA off it.

Her guess was no. It wouldn’t happen, but someone had to have touched those pictures to put them in.

“That makes it hard but not impossible,” Zander said.

She handed over copies of everything she’d been given from Knox County. “This was released to me last week. It’s my mother’s work history, where she has lived and her visits with the case managers. She’d been getting assistance for years and meeting with case managers. I’ve read it all but nothing is standing out.”

It’d been depressing to see what became of her mother’s life.

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