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“My dad’s in San Francisco. You must have got it wrong. I’ll just go get him from the room.”
“No, Mrs. Evans. The man said he was Andy’s grandfather,” she responds, but this time her face looks panicked. This girl is fucking hopeless, and if this is a joke, it’s beyond ridiculous now.
“Jennie, this isn’t a joke,” I say sternly. “Where’s my son?”
Lex walks back from the room with a concerned face. “Andy isn’t here.”
The bile in my throat rises, and my body starts to shake manically. Jennie begins to stutter out words I can’t comprehend. She leaves and returns within seconds with the manager.
“Andrea, where’s Andy?” I beg her for answers.
Andrea’s face turns to Jennie, and they speak in code, something passes between them, and Jennie begins to clutch her chest while shaking her head.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Evans. Jennie is new here. We can watch the footage and see who it was.” She rushes back to her office, and I follow, hoping it’s Julian who picked him up. With the video footage rewound, I see an older-looking man with his head down as Jennie speaks to him. I don’t recognize him at all and look over to Lex as the panic sets in.
This isn’t happening.
It’s a nightmare—just wake up now!
“Where’s my baby?” I demand, sobbing as the scream echoes through the office.
Lex grabs his cell and dials 9-1-1. The sound of his voice drowns out as I struggle to find Julian’s number, the screen is blurred as I
tremble in fear. Finally, the call connects, and I pray he will answer.
“Adriana?”
I sob into the phone, mumbling, paralyzed with shock.
“Adriana, what’s wrong?”
“My baby… someone took my baby.”
Julian demands to know where I am, but I can barely speak let alone recite the address of the daycare. The cell slides out of my hand and crashes onto the floor. With hope that this is all a cruel joke, I turn to Lex for reassurance, but his face is red as he howls at the manager, her pleading with him to calm down as she cries uncontrollably.
Helpless and frightened, I slide against the wall and sit on the floor hugging my knees as I rock back and forth.
Moments later, Julian bursts through the front door behind the police. He spots me and rushes over falling to his knees. I look directly into his eyes, and suddenly, my blood drains as the realization that Julian is alone and without Andy. Julian places his hand on my face, the panic reflecting in his eyes confirms what my head refuses to believe every parent’s worst nightmare.
Someone has kidnapped my son.
LEX
As a parent, we’re programmed to protect our children from the moment they lay in their mother’s womb. Just like in the wild, our instincts are to nurture, care for our children, and ensure they are never harmed or experience suffering or pain. We guide them, educate them, give them the tools to succeed to become the greatest person they can be. The emotions attached to becoming a parent are ones that nothing in life can prepare you for, but somehow, we get through each day, and if there’s one thing I know in my life that I did right, it’s creating my beautiful girls with Charlotte.
Andy isn’t biologically my son, but he is my blood, and from the moment I rested my eyes on this little boy, the connection between us was a force so strong that it caught me by surprise. He’s the beautiful, innocent little baby who, at only one week old, has suffered more pain than I have in my entire lifetime.
He lost his father.
I knew I had to protect him. He may not have called me Dad, but I treated him no different to my own daughters. It isn’t fair he had a rough start to life, and it’s not fair he’d grow up and not understand what it’s like to call a man Daddy.
No kid deserves that.
Adriana was bound to find someone, I just didn’t expect it to be so soon, and the giant fucking curveball bigger than planet Jupiter, it was Julian Baker.
How this motherfucker managed to waltz back into our lives without me knowing rang alarm bells. I had Bryce do a background check on him again, and it came back all clear. He’d been in Australia promoting some book bullshit, but that didn’t ease my apprehension. I was beyond livid, outraged, and lashing out at everyone around me the moment they revealed their affair. It almost cost me my marriage, jumping to all sorts of conclusions that Charlotte was somewhat aware of the situation. I refused to lose my wife, fucking her into oblivion every moment we had spare. She was mine, and who would’ve thought that even I’d complain about a sore dick. Fuck, even so I still carried on. I was on a mission.
And my sister—I’ve never felt so much hatred as I did when she told me the truth—to disrespect my brother, Elijah, to bring that low-life scum back into our lives after what he did to Charlotte. Just because he ‘saved’ Charlotte and Ava that night she crashed the car, didn’t mean I owed him a damn thing, let alone be grateful he was fucking my sister.
