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His phone dinged with a text alert before he opened the email.
“It’s from Marissa.”
“What did she say?”
“She asked if I got the results, too.”
My heart was pounding a mile a minute. I felt like a horrible person for secretly hoping that Cash wasn’t the father of the most adorable baby I’d ever seen in my life, but I couldn’t help it. As soon as I’d seen Marissa standing at the bottom of the stairs, I’d recognized her. She was the woman I’d passed in the hallway at the boarding house who I’d thought was a dead ringer for a young Brooke Shields. Which meant that Cash’s possible baby mama was the spitting image of one of the most beautiful people in the world. I knew that if he was the baby’s father, everything was about to change.
He stared at me. I wasn’t sure if he was silently asking for permission or support to finding out the news, but I knew that I had to give him both.
I forced the corners of my mouth to turn up in a smile. “Open it,” I encouraged him.
His eyes dropped to his phone and he tapped on the screen. I watched as he read the correspondence, searching his face for any tell, any sign of what the results were.
Unfortunately, his expression was unreadable. Deep down in my heart, I knew the answer. I didn’t know how I knew that he was the father. I doubted Marissa would have shown up on his doorstep unless she was certain, and also I’d seen the uncanny resemblance between Amelia and Cash. Especially now that Colleen had shown me all of his baby pictures. They might as well have been twins.
“You are, aren’t you?” I asked, not able to wait another second before having my fear confirmed.
He nodded, then turned the phone around so that I could read the results for myself.
There it was in black and white.
The alleged father cannot be excluded as the biological father of the tested child. Based on the analysis of STR loci above, the probability of paternity is 99.678432%.
“Congratulations!” I reached out to hug him when my phone rang.
I was going to ignore it but I saw that it was Milly, my grandparents’ house manager. She’d never called me before.
“Hello,” I answered, sure that it must have been a butt dial.
“Cheyenne?” She sounded like she was crying.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s your grandmother. I found her in the tub. Unconscious. The ambulance came, they took her to the hospital.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know.” She sniffed. “When they came they had to shock her. Twice. I think they got a faint pulse, so they took her to the hospital.”
“Where’s my grandfather?”
“He was on the course. I called him so many times, but he didn’t answer. When he finally called me back, he said he left his phone in the clubhouse. And he told me to call you and tell you to come home. Now.”
“Okay. I’ll be there soon.” I hung up the phone.
“What’s wrong?” Cash’s hand covered my knee.
“It’s my grandmother. She’s in the hospital.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know, but I have to go there.” I started looking up flights.
“I’ll go with you.”
“No.” I shook my head.
“I don’t want you facing that alone.” His fingers squeezed my thigh. “I’ll call Marissa and tell her there’s a family emergency and I’ll be back in a couple of days. If she has to go back home, then I’ll go to Boston once I know you’re okay.”
“I don’t want you to go with me.” I covered my hand over his and slid it off my leg. “I’ll be fine.”
I needed to handle my family emergency on my own. Because Cash had a family now, and it wasn’t me. He had a daughter, and that changed everything.
