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Only, she wasn’t my child.
I knew that with the certainty I knew that the sun would rise tomorrow.
I had a bad relationship with Saranda.
To the point where I wasn’t even sure why I was with her, all of my family hated her, and all of the boys on my racing team hated her.
Truthfully, she was a good distraction, she looked good on my arm at events, and she went out of her way to make life easy for me. She didn’t complain about my schedule. She didn’t demand things of me that I couldn’t give—like commitment or children—and she didn’t ask me for anything other than going to an event with her from time to time.
The thing was, she wasn’t very easy to get along with.
My mom, most of all, couldn’t stand her.
And when your mom couldn’t stand the woman you were dating, she didn’t let you hear the end of it.
In all honesty, the splitting up was fairly amicable.
She hadn’t wanted to break up, but she also didn’t want to deal with my mother anymore, so we’d chosen to go our different ways.
I’d let her go fairly easily, hadn’t even thought of her much over the last six months to be honest.
But the fact that she’d been pregnant when we’d broken up—and had gone out of her way to hide it—pissed me off.
Now she was trying to play this baby off as mine?
That wasn’t going to happen.
The kid was cute, sure.
But the baby had skin the color of milk chocolate, and though I tanned, I didn’t tan quite that darkly. The baby also had dark, curly hair, cute little dimples, and chubby lips that looked so freakin’ cute on her that it was heartbreaking.
The only problem was, neither Saranda nor I had dimples.
She and I were both as white as sugar.
And neither one of us had dark enough colored hair in any of our family trees to produce that kind of darkness.
But there was one person that I knew to have dimples, dark hair, and milk chocolate skin.
One of my pit crew.
After a lot of fighting it out, and getting Akon to the house as well as CPS, a DNA test was done for both of us.
But the truth had been revealed. Akon had slept with my girlfriend, and he hadn’t said anything because he hadn’t wanted to be fired.
According to Akon, it was one night of drunken fun, and he’d been so blindingly drunk that he hadn’t even realized he’d done it until the next morning. By the time he’d worked up the courage to tell me months later, he’d heard that we’d broken up, so he’d chosen to keep the peace instead of saying something.
Which led us to now.
“Without proof that either one of you are the father, and Saranda Walker in the wind, we’ll be taking the baby into custody until the DNA test results come back,” had been the CPS worker’s parting shot as she’d taken the baby out the door.
My mom had been pissed as hell, but relieved to hear and believe the truth.
Akon had left with his job still intact, and the knowledge that he now had a cute as hell baby that he was about to have on his hands full-time.
But my mom waited until everyone was gone, leaving her alone with me, before she dropped another bomb on me.
“I have breast cancer.”
I blinked.
“I know that you didn’t get good results today, and I was going to wait to tell you, but hells bells, Nash. I think you need to know, and I think you’d be offended if I didn’t tell you until this was all better,” she said out of the blue.
The words hit me in the chest like a sledgehammer.
Fuck. Cancer.
“How bad?” I croaked.
She looked at me with a sad smile. “Bad enough that we’re worried.”
Bad enough that we’re worried.
“These genetics…” She shook her head. “I’m so sorry for passing all of this down to y’all. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another, and I’m devastated that you have to deal with this with what you’re going through.”
I started shaking my head. “Mom, don’t think like that.”
She wiped away a tear that started dripping down her cheek.
“You have no idea the guilt your father and I feel for all of this,” she said. “It’s so unfair. We gave you the worst genes in the world. That’s why I wanted you all to be doctors so bad. At least this way you have your foot in the door. People will treat you better when they know that you’re one of them.”
She did have a point.
“Mom,” I repeated, pulling her in to hug.
She leaned into me, and I wrapped her frail frame—when had she lost so much weight?—into mine and held her.
She started to sob, and she was still sobbing when my father walked through the door, looking haggard.
