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“After what you’ve just said, you might as well admit it,” Ainsley said. “Anyway, we already had it figured out.”
Micheline hung her head, a tear trickling down her cheek, creating a thin rivulet of dark mascara. “Of course you have.” She sniffled. “And anyway, there’s no point in holding it back any longer. Not when—not when I’ve been diagnosed with stage three bone cancer. It’s why Jake’s coming. To see me off, in case this last-ditch treatment doesn’t offer the miracle I...”
She paused as if waiting for someone to offer the customary sympathy. But these weren’t customary circumstances.
Even so, Ace finally forced himself to say, “Sorry you’re ill,” because his mother—the real mother who had loved and raised him—would have expected it of him.
Nodding an acknowledgment, Micheline said, “That’s a good man, so I’ll be very honest now. I did switch you with my newborn. It was a low point in my life, when I didn’t feel up to motherhood. I was all alone, and you were a strapping boy, so vigorous. When I saw how sickly the real Ace Colton was, I was sure he wouldn’t survive more than a day or two, and then I’d have my life back again.”
“So you just—you just traded them?” Marlowe’s horror was written in her eyes.
Her eyes damp, Micheline nodded. “I switched him with my biological son so he’d have excellent parents to grow up with and all the advantages I could never give him. And then I took the dying baby. I thought... I was certain I was doing a good thing. The right thing...for—for everyone.”
She burst into sobs and buried her face into a handful of tissues from the box that Ainsley pushed in her direction.
While Micheline wept, the siblings stared at one another, shock rippling over them like blast waves from a bomb that had detonated forty years before. Holy hell, Ace thought, as the details of her story sank in.
Still, something didn’t feel right. As he watched his biological mother’s continuing performance, he knew it in his bones. Micheline was still up to something nefarious. Something he sensed would come back to bite them when the real Jake Anderson finally turned up. But at least he’d have his family—the ones he’d grown up with, his newfound daughter and grandchild on the way, and Sierra. With them by his side, he knew could handle anything.
* * *
