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I swallowed hard. “It was only after we found out that I was well and indeed pregnant that I felt like something was off this time. She was acting super weird, always wanting to know my every whereabouts. She would call and ask me what I had for dinner and whether or not I got my ‘greens’ in today.”
“I thought it was just her being overprotective and overreactive. I don’t know. But then when the sonogram for the twenty-week scan came up with some abnormalities…”
“What kind of abnormalities?” he rasped.
I scrubbed my hands down my face. “It was found in a blood test scan that JP had hemophilia.”
There was a long moment of silence and then, “Why would that be something that they would test for?”
“My thoughts exactly,” I said. “Especially since neither Lisbeth nor Farrell has hemophilia.”
“Hemophilia,” he said. “Is that the bleeding disorder?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s it. Blood doesn’t clot correctly.”
He growled. “And is that something that is genetically passed on to the child?”
I nodded, heart in my throat.
“Are you telling me that you didn’t know that you agreed to have a baby put inside of you that wasn’t your friend’s and her husband’s, but yours and another man’s?” he asked, sounding quite controlled.
But when I looked over, I saw that his hands were now fisted together, elbows resting on his knees.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m telling you that. They felt the need to test our child because of my issues. Just in case. Since I had so many issues.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I have hemophiliaB, which is a serious shortage of coagulation factor IX. Pretty much, I make it, but not enough to protect me. JP has it, too, just on a much milder scale. Taking her medication also helps with her clotting.”
Meaning the moment I saw JP doing anything dangerous, I freaked the fuck out.
Luckily, she led a fairly normal life as long as she was on her medication. As long as I could forge a doctor’s note and get her the medication she needed. Luckily, that was fairly easy to do nowadays with everything being electronic.
“So you found out that you had a baby on the way that wasn’t theirs but yours,” he said. “What happened then?”
I swallowed hard, remembering those first few days after I found out.
“At first, nothing,” I admitted. “I was processing the information.” I looked at my daughter’s long, curly hair. “I didn’t know who her father was, but I did know that Farrell definitely wasn’t it. In the middle of summer, JP turns this beautiful mocha color. A few years ago, I decided to have her DNA ran, and with the AncestryDNA site, I was able to find out that her father was semi-loosely related to a family from Japan.”
His head whipped around, eyes intense.
“Not you, don’t worry.” I laughed.
“There’s no way that that would happen,” he admitted. “But I do have a father that does some sketchy stuff for money.”
I scrunched up my nose. “That’s gross to even think about…but anyway. Eventually, I did some tracking down. It was some broke college kid trying to make ends meet. He was half Japanese, half Filipino. And definitely not Irish American like Farrell.”
“You were explaining about the first few days…” he left me hanging.
“The first few days after they let me know that I was the actual mother…” I blew out a long breath, my eyes once again going over to JP automatically. She was hanging from the monkey bar, a look of utter glee on her face. One good thing about coming here was she had a lot of friends her age, courtesy of the circus staff. “Were rough on my part. I spent a lot of the time freaking out because I didn’t know what to do. I contacted a few lawyers and realized that I was a very broke, just graduated college student. And unless I was willing to do something really bad, like steal a bunch of money, then that route wasn’t going to work either.”
I scrubbed my hands up and down my face. “The fourth day was when I tried to go out of town. Not to leave or anything, but to clear my head. I wanted to go hiking, and that felt like something that would really clear everything up for me. Just some distance. To give me time to think about what’s next for me.”
“What happened?” he asked.
I licked my lips. “I was met at the town’s border by a cop car. Farrell was a cop, you know.”
He nodded.
