Page 54 of Heartbeat

He sat sipping his drink, still in shock about Fiona. He was ninety-nine percent sure she was responsible for the bomb, and stunned by the level of her betrayal. He’d never seen this coming. Never suspected her of deceit—until that day she’d found the refuse from the testing kit he’d sent to Ancestry.com. Why would she care if he found family, unless she was planning his demise and expected to be his only heir?

It was fifteen minutes to five when he finally went backinside. He wanted a steak, but he would be having ham and cheese on whole wheat bread and be grateful he still had choices. Stuart Bien damn sure did not. So, he made the sandwich and a cup of coffee and went back to the laptop.

Another hour later and Wolf was down to the last and most recent emails on his business account, all of them advertisements or random companies peddling their wares to a mailing list when he saw a notice from Ancestry.com. Finally, his test results! He opened it, read it, and then created his account. His family tree only had one leaf. His name. He would have to enter his mother and father’s names later, but all of their info was at home.

Then he scrolled down farther through his email and saw another notice.

A Possible Ancestry Link.He frowned. How could he get a personal notice so fast? He went back and checked the date of the first notice. It wasn’t recent. Then he checked this notice. It had come days after his first report, and yet he’d seen neither of them on his personal account, and they’d arrived before his supposed death.

What the hell is going on?

Still confused, he opened the second notice and had to read it twice before the info sank in. Then his heart skipped a beat.

A daughter? I might have a daughter? That is fucking impossible.

He had to take the chance and opened his personal email account. Neither of those messages where there, and they should have been because he’d used both ofthem as contact addresses and listed the personal one first. Why were they on the business account and not the personal one?

He hadn’t opened his personal account at all for fear of someone knowing it was active, but he had to find out what was happening and went to the personal account, only to find out neither of them were there.

But what he did find was a response to the notice of having a match. He opened his ancestry page, went through the info on the possible link, and began to read, and as he did, became horrified at what was unfolding in front of him.

If this young woman’s DNA was a match to his DNA, then his ex-in-laws had lied through their teeth and given his daughter away! It seemed impossible, but it was the only explanation…because after his wife and daughter’s deaths, and because of what they’d told him, he’d had a vasectomy to keep from ever fathering a child again.

He read the letter again, reading between the lines to the poignancy of the post, and then he googled the woman’s name. Link after link appeared, regarding her connection to a CPA firm in Tulsa and then to a horrifying car crash. And then something about winning a lawsuit against the drunk driver who nearly killed her.

Then he found an article with her photo and froze.

“Oh my God, oh my God, Shandy, my Shandy…it’s you. She’s you!”

In that moment, he knew this had to be his child because she was the spitting image of the woman he’d loved andlost. His voice was shaking. He felt like throwing up. “That fucking family. They gave you away because they wanted no part of me. When all of this is over, I’m going to make them wish they were the ones who’d never been born.”

But now that he’d seen her letter and the photo, it didn’t answer the question of why he hadn’t received his own information from the test he’d sent in.

Then it hit him. Fiona! She’d already had a fit about him submitting the test.What if she’d been watching for that email results? She could have been checking my email for days. What if she’d seen it and deleted it because she didn’t want me to know?

His thoughts were in free fall, but this worked both ways. He didn’t want Fiona to know this young woman existed. It could put her in danger, too! So, he copied her letter to his work email. But his elation in learning he had a daughter came with the gut-wrenching fear that her life was now in danger because of him. If Fiona wanted him dead for his money, then she wasn’t going to want to share it with a daughter she didn’t know he had. Stuart Bien had already died. He’d be damned before he’d let this happen again.

He wanted to call Amalie. But his first thought was protecting her, and so he called Colin Ramsey instead.

Colin was sitting on his sofa, with a pizza on the coffee table in front of him and a beer at his elbow. Between theinfo they’d received from Wolf Outen, and then the call from Detective Muncy in the Miami PD, it felt like the case was beginning to come together. If the leads he’d been given came to fruition, the randomness of it all was boiling down to a greedy woman. They were still waiting on reports from the evidence gathered at the crash site, but progress was slow due to the sheer quantity of it.

He’d just chewed and swallowed his last bite and was reaching for another slice when his cell phone rang. Out of Area was all the screen showed on caller ID, but he guessed it was Wolf.

“Hello, this is Colin.”

“It’s me,” Wolf said. “I don’t suppose you have any firm evidence yet to link Fiona to this mess?”

“No, we don’t, Wolf. What’s wrong?”

“I just discovered something that is concerning to me, and I’m not sure how to handle it,” and then he went into the whole explanation, and ended with, “What should I do? I’m afraid not to warn her. But without being certain it’s Fiona at the bottom of it, I don’t know who to warn her from.”

“What if she’s not your daughter?” Colin asked. “You’d still want to confirm it through another DNA test.”

“Ancestry already did that for us, and when I saw her photo, I knew it was her. She’s a mirror image of her mother, Shandy, who was my first wife.”

“So how did you lose a baby, if you had a wife?”

“I was overseas working on an oil rig at the time. You know…there was big money in Saudi oil patches backthen, and I was gone for months at a time. We were living with her parents and Shandy was five months pregnant when I left again. The paycheck for the job would set us up in our own place. I’d been there for months and was due to fly back in three weeks when I got a call that Shandy had gone into an early labor. It was a bad scene. I hopped the first plane out, but by the time I got there, she’d already delivered and was dying from a brain bleed, one of those unknown aneurysms people have and never know about until they blow. Her parents told me the baby had been born dead and severely malformed. They’d already had it removed to a crematorium. Shandy died in my arms less than an hour after my arrival. I was out of my mind with grief and disbelief, and the day after the funeral, they kicked me out of their lives. All I can think is that the fuckers gave away the baby because they wanted no part of me.”

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