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Likely setting, he silently muttered.
It was a sad day in a man’s life when he tried to BS himself so Gray did a mental adjustment and admitted the truth. He’d wanted to get Alana away from here. Here where he was seemingly frozen in place while staring at Sadie Jo’s headstone. Away from here so he could spill all and maybe have Alana help him make sense of things.
She’d always been good at that when they’d been together. Listening. Helping him put things in perspective. Allowing him to vent and grieve. Alana had done all of that when his mother had died fifteen years ago.
Or rather the woman he’d thought had been his mother.
Her death had shaken him to the bone, and Alana had helped him get through that.
“News about this hasn’t made it to the gossips,” Alana added a moment later.
“No,” he agreed. “Her lawyer has apparently known for a while now, since Sadie Jo moved to Last Ride and asked him to handle her will and her estate.”
“But neither her attorney nor Sadie Jo said anything about it to you?” she pressed.
“Not a word. Sadie Jo asked her lawyer to keep everything to himself until the estate was settled. That took a few months, and he managed to keep the details of the probate to himself.”
The lawyer would continue to do that, but Gray knew word of this would get out. Well, it probably would. His parents obviously hadn’t had trouble keeping his parentage a secret all this time.
“All right,” Alana said after muttering something under her breath. Gray didn’t catch all the words, but there was some profanity mixed in there. “You’re sure Sadie Jo gave birth to you?”
He appreciated that Alana had phrased it that way rather than asking if he was sure the woman was hismother. Gray didn’t want that label applied to her, especially since Sadie Jo had obviously been a big participant in the “let’s lie our heads off to Gray” arrangement.
“I’m sure,” Gray verified, and he dragged in a long breath, ready to spill the rest. That’s when he saw the sweat popping out on Alana’s face, and even though she’d scooped up her long blond hair into a ponytail and was wearing a loose cotton dress, she was obviously still hot. Rather than risk possible heatstroke, he motioned for her to follow him back to his truck.
“I would ask you if you’re okay,” she said when they got moving, “but I can see you’re not. I’m so sorry, Gray.”
And there it was. Sympathy that he wouldn’t have wanted coming from anyone else. However, it seemed to be what he needed from Alana. It sure as hell didn’t fix things, but Gray wasn’t sure this was a fixable situation.
They climbed into his truck, and he immediately started the engine, cranking up the AC as high as it would go. “Mind if I drive around while we talk? I can bring you back here later to get your car,” he added.
“Drive,” she agreed. “Last I checked, riding in a truck with a hot cowboy doesn’t violate my vow of celibacy.”
Despite his heavy heart, he smiled, which was no doubt her intention. That was something else he always admired about Alana. Even when he was in the darkest pit of despair, she could make him smile.
“This morning I got a call from Asher Parkman,” Gray started as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. “I was surprised since he’s not my lawyer.” But Asher wasalawyer, and was head of the most prominent law firm in town. “He said he needed to talk to me, that I was a beneficiary in a will.”
That had given Gray a jolt because his first thought was that his father had made a will. That his father had needed a reason to do so. Such as having a fatal disease. But then Asher had clarified and said it was from the recently probated will of Sadie Jo Walker.
“Asher didn’t want to get into the details over the phone,” Gray went on, “so I drove from my place in San Antonio to his office, and he showed me a DNA report that proved Sadie Jo was my bio parent. She apparently had the test run when I was a kid and had given the results to Asher.”
“When you were a kid?” Alana made a sound that seemed to be a mixture of surprise and outrage for him being kept out of the loop on this. “So, your folks would have known about the DNA test, or did Sadie Jo sneak around and do it?”
“My folks knew,” he verified. He had to pause a couple of seconds to get over the gut punch of learning that. “Sadie Jo must have talked them into it because I remember doing the test when I was six or seven. I didn’t know what it was because my parents lied and said it was because I’d been exposed to strep, but the dates match up on the report Sadie Jo gave to Asher.”
Alana stayed quiet, obviously processing that. Maybe she’d have better luck with that than he had. Gray had spent the last three hours processing, and he couldn’t get past the anger of all the lies.
“So, Sadie Jo would have been about twenty-one when you were born,” Alana muttered. “Like I said, I haven’t done a lot of research on her, but I don’t believe she ever got married. Maybe she felt she was too young to raise a child, or maybe the guy who got her pregnant... I’m so sorry,” she tacked on to that.
She’d no doubt been about to say the guy who’d gotten Sadie Jo pregnant hadn’t wanted the kid. Or had run out on her. Either was possible.
“Sadie Jo didn’t leave any DNA results for my bio father,” Gray supplied. “She didn’t leave any info about that either in her will or with Asher.”
Alana went quiet, no doubt in the mulling mode again. “You don’t remember your parents saying anything about any of this?”
“Not a word. I’ve seen my birth certificate, and it has their names on it, but Asher says that’s the way it works in an adoption. The adoptive parents’ names are listed as the birth parents.”
Gray wanted to curse the words,birth parentsandadoption, but that’s exactly what had happened to him. He didn’t know why, didn’t have the details of why something so huge—his own parentage—had been kept from him.
