AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But this was Charleigh we were talking about. Charleigh who I’d confessed everything to.
Everything but this.
“Is he yours?” She choked the words around a sob.
I wavered, uncertainty battering my brain. My devotion tothe child had become the greatest focus of my life. My reason. But Charleigh had become that, too. I couldn’t keep her in the dark. Not with this.
I minutely shook my head. “I love him in every sense of the word, but no, he’s not my biological son.”
It felt like a blade was driven through me at saying it.
Charleigh broke at the confession, and she flew into a fury of sorrow and grief and rage. In the span of a second, she’d erased the space between us and was slamming her fists against my chest. “Whose is he? Whose is he? You said his mother was dead. Tell me.”
She kept begging it. Wheezing it over the grief that clotted her throat.
What the fuck was going on?
I tried to gather her up and stop her assault, but she was distraught, verging on hysterical. “Tell me!”
I managed to pull her to my chest, and I locked my arms around her. My thoughts were a disorder as I tried to catch up to what she was implying.
I tucked her tight, pinning her arms to my chest as I muttered at the top of her head, the grief of what I’d felt that day slamming me through.
The way I’d failed.
The way I’d made the commitment that day that Nolan would be the only person I would ever again make a commitment to.
Until her.
“She is dead.” The words scraped from my throat as if they were a confession.
“No,” Charleigh sobbed, her head shaking against the violent thunder in my chest. “No. You had his things. I know they are the same. It’s him. It’s him. And his hair…the birthmark.”
“Charleigh.” I tried to break into the turmoil that had her trapped.
“Levi. He’s Levi.”
I went cold. A slick of ice slipped down my spine, freezing every inch of me as it went.
“What did you say?” It raked out of me like the dragging of razors.
“Levi. My son was Levi.”
Levi.
I started to tremble, guts a tangle of confusion and fear.
“Tell me who you’ve been runnin’ from, Charleigh. Who?” It grated off my tongue.
Charleigh went rigid before she burrowed deeper into my chest.
“Frederick Winston.”
The two words hit me like shotgun blasts.
The room spun around me, and the walls closed in. I held her tighter as it all sped, coming together. The truth slammed me like a runaway train.
Charleigh Lowe doesn’t exist.
