Page 93 of Inheriting Miss Fortune

I didn’t nod.

But I wanted to.

Instead, I went over and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks for watching her last night.”

She grabbed me and gave me a tight hug. “Grammy’s privilege,” she said. “I’ve decided that’s my grandma name, so all of you can start using it now instead of waiting for Sheridan’s baby to arrive.”

I’d only been back in Majestic for a few days when she’d gotten the whole story from me about Lellie’s near abduction by the Scotts and my parents’ subsequent rejection of me. Again.

She’d been incensed and had immediately claimed me as her own child from here on out, telling me that when the time was right for me to call her “Mom,” she would be ready for it. Jolene Blake was good people. The best.

I poured and doctored a coffee for Tully before taking it to him at the table. He’d pulled Lellie out of her booster seat and into his lap, where he was trying without much success to clean her red, sticky hands.

“Thank you,” he said in pleased surprise when I handed him the coffee. He set it out of Lellie’s reach when he realized it was still too hot to drink.

As I turned to make my own coffee, the shrill sound of my phone ringing pierced the gentle hum of family and friends chattering all around me.

I glanced down at the display, surprised to see Susanna’s name on the screen. A call from my Texas attorney on a Saturday morning? I felt a sliver of unease in my stomach.

“Hey,” I said, answering it quickly.

Tully looked over with furrowed eyebrows. So did the others.

“Hey, Dev. Got a sec?”

My body began to tremble at the careful tone of her voice. “Of course. What is it?”

“The paternity results came back. And Dev… they show Lellie isn’t your biological child.”

Black shadows rushed in around the edges of my vision. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I know. Dev, I know. It may be a lab mix-up, or it may be… something else. The results came in last night, but I didn’t check my mail until this morning. I wanted to tell you first thing and let you know not to worry yet.”

Yet. She said not to worryyet. As if there would come a time for worrying soon.

As if I could simply stop worrying that I might lose my daughter.

“Baby,” Tully said, startling me by grabbing my arm and trying to guide me to a chair. “What’s wrong? Who’s on the phone?”

My hands shook as I tried to figure out whether to hand him the phone or try to find the words to explain that this situation had suddenly taken an unexpected and horrific turn.

The kitchen was silent as everyone stared.

Tully didn’t wait to get a response from me. He grabbed the phone and held it to his ear. “This is Tully Bowman. Who am I speaking to?”

The temporary relief in his voice only lasted a moment until Susanna explained the situation. But then his tone was one of anger, not shock and disappointment like I felt.

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” he snapped before lowering his voice. “Anyone with eyeballs can see this child is Devon McKay’s flesh and blood. Hell, Susanna, she looks more like Dev than Katie. What the fuck happened?”

I stared at Lellie as if studying her features would give me some kind of reassurance. I remembered the first moment I saw her—Tully standing defiantly among the crowd at Final Nightwith her propped on his hip, her little head lifting up from where it had lain on his shoulder, her eyes so instantly familiar to me.

Tully was right.

My rational brain knew there was no possible way she wasn’t my daughter. Not only did she have my eyes, but I knew Katie. Tully knew Katie. Renata knew Katie. And all of us knew that Katie was asexual. She’d planned her fertility journey carefully and had selected me because she knew me well and was comfortable with me.

But the less-rational part of me, the part that had learned the hard way that life was a series of plot twists and fuckups, reminded me that mistakes happened in labs, and there were probably plenty of sperm donors with hazel eyes. That part of me believed every bit of Susanna’s news because it had tapped into my worst fear.

I was going to lose another beloved family member, only this time, the family member was closer and more important to me than Matt had ever been. More important even than my own mother and father.

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