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A tiny voice said, “I love you, Uncle Conor,” making him jump about a foot.
Carly cracked up as she bounced her baby boy in the sling. A tuft of dark hair was barely visible above the cloth. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.” She leaned forward to give Bliss a kiss on the cheek.
“I’m really glad you’re here, Bliss,” she murmured.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier—”
“Nope. No apologies. As far as I’m concerned, pregnant people get all the passes. Right, dear husband of mine?” Her green eyes sparkled up at the dark-haired man by her side.
“You won’t hear me arguing. At least not out loud.”
“Are you trying to claim you don’t argue with me?”
“Uh…no?”
Granger chuckled at that. Thomas gave him a look so full of commiseration that Granger wished he could bottle it up for future use. He’d just gone through this baby-on-the-way experience, after all.
It was a bit different, since Thomas and Carly were a married couple, and Granger and Bliss were…something that didn’t seem to have a name. But much of it was the same. Impending fatherhood was pretty universal, he figured. Thomas probably understood the moments of panic that hit out of the blue, the sleepless nights spent planning out various doomsday scenarios.
What he didn’t understand—couldn’t possibly—was how it felt to have a big question mark hanging over him. What was he passing on to this new little being? The question kept haunting him.
At the hospital in New York, he’d asked the surgeon if he’d run any blood tests on him.
“Well sure, a tox screen, basic blood typing, that sort of thing. It’s standard practice before a surgery.”
“Did you find anything…unusual? Concerning?”
“Like what? Evidence of alien origins, that sort of thing?” The doctor was a joker. Just his luck. “Clean as they come, as far as our tests showed. If you want something more, like a DNA test, I can refer you to some organizations.”
After agonizing over it during that last night in the hospital, he’d made up his mind. He’d taken the referrals from the doctor and submitted a blood sample for DNA analysis.
I owe it to Bliss. I owe it to the little podling. Hell, I owe it to myself.
The results were supposed to come in a few weeks, and in the meantime, he couldn’t stop thinking about them. What if he discovered something terrible about his origins? What would he tell Bliss? Sorry to deliver the bad news, but your baby is seventy-point-two percent likely to inherit a chromosomal deficiency or at least a grumpy disposition. That’s on top of your baby being twenty-five percent lying con artist, and twenty-five percent slacker roadie—and that’s the optimistic scenario. The podling might be twenty-five percent druggie-convict-drummer.
As he limped toward the paramedic van Thomas had brought—in case they needed the gurney—he knew that Bliss figured his bad mood was because of the nagging pain. There was that, but he found physical pain relatively easy to deal with. The hard part was this nagging fear of what some random lab techs in New Jersey were going to find out about him. He knew he wouldn’t be able to take an easy breath until those results came.
Should he tell Bliss what was really on his mind? He knew she was curious about the time he spent on the computer. He wanted to tell her that he was trying to track down former Freaks crew members, just in case they were his missing father. But something kept stopping him. He wasn’t in the habit of opening up to people.
Then again, if anyone understood that, it would be Bliss. They were both so used to keeping parts of themselves hidden.
But Bliss—he had to hand it to her. She’d gotten over her hesitation about sharing the news of her pregnancy. And she’d done it forhim,because they needed a safe haven where he could recover. Whenever he thought about that, his heart…did some interesting things that he couldn’t quite figure out.
Twenty-Three
“If paranoia was a house, it would look exactly like this,” Bliss announced after she and Granger had thoroughly explored the Mason house.
The place reminded Bliss of homes she’d seen in California that belonged to tech sector venture capitalists. It had cameras everywhere and an entire room filled with monitors and servers. It had perimeter alarms and voice-activated automation. She hated it.
“I love it,” said Granger, more enthusiastically than she’d seen him say anything since he’d been released from the hospital.
“Of course you do. Let me rephrase. If anFBI agentwas a house, it would probably look like this.”
He smiled. “To be honest, it’s probably overkill. That guy in the elevator was an amateur.”
“Moses loves it,” Bliss pointed out. “Look at him.”
The little Chihuahua was scurrying around the house doing a thorough investigation.
