Page 59 of Beck and Call

"You need to back off and leave her alone. You've done enough. I told you to figure your shit out, and instead you made another fucking mess. Don't come near Evie until you can let Callie go."

* * *

Evie

"Thank you, that was just what I needed," I said to Jana as she parked in the garage of her apartment building.

"I needed to get away too. I wish we could have stayed an extra day, but I actually have to attend the Thursday meeting my dad insists on. When you start on Monday we are going to have to do a lot of work to fix the ad campaign by the idiot my dad hired to launch the new line of vodka."

I rubbed my belly. "Just as long as I don't have to test any of it."

We took the elevator up to her floor. When the doors opened we saw Colter Greyson sitting on the floor by her apartment. He looked haggard, definitely not his usual polished carefree self.

"Colter, what are you doing here?" I asked.

"Waiting for you," he said in a husky voice. If I didn't know better, I'd guess he'd been crying.

"You okay with talking to him?" Jana asked.

I nodded. "Stay close?"

"Try and stop me."

He followed us into the apartment. And walked to look out of the window.

"Are you alright?" I asked.

"Your mother is Jenny Holmes, right?" he asked.

I nodded, then realized he was still looking out the window. "Yes. I mean she was."

"Right, was," he muttered.

"Did she ever tell you who your father is?" he asked.

I sat down on the sofa. After finding out I was pregnant, breaking up with Beckett, and basically quitting my job, I wasn't really ready for the emotional cost to think about my mother.

"He was a boy she met the summer she was fifteen. She said he was in town with a volunteer group building houses. She used to babysit for some kids in the neighborhood they were building in. They snuck around all summer, even my grandma didn't know. I guess they promised to keep in touch, but she never heard from him again after he left. She didn't have his last name or his phone number so there was no way to let him know he was a father."

He seemed to hold his breath, and let his head drop against the window. "And after you were born?"

This was the hard part. It was one thing to tell yourself you didn't cause the problems in someone's life, but another to really believe them. "My mother was wild, according to my grandmother. Impulsive and temperamental. During her pregnancy those traits got worse. After I was born she would disappear for days to weeks at a time. My grandma raised me. If we weren't as poor as we were, maybe she'd have gotten treatment for what was obviously mental illness. We weren't though, and my momma went and treated herself."

My accent was full blown at the moment. I couldn't have controlled the twang in my speech any more than I could the tears running down my face.

"Why do you want to know about my momma? It isn't a happy story. It had a hard beginning with my granddad running out on my grandma, a hard middle with her becoming a teenage mom, and a tragic ending when she couldn't take it anymore."

He turned away from the window and looked at me with bloodshot hazel eyes. "She killed herself?"

I shrugged. "I'm not sure she meant to, but the result was the same."

"Why are you here?" I pressed.

"Beckett and I were called down to BioSolutions today. Turns out they had two sets of results for us."

"I know they told that dickhead he's going to be a father, or a sperm donor rather. What were the other results?"

"Evie, I'm your father."

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