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“You.” I point my pistol though the windshield and it holds his hands up. “Turn off the vehicle, put the keys on the dash and exit the van, hands on the hood next to your partner here.” I look at my dad. “Cover him.”
He nods as I shift to the side doors, keeping my pistol aimed as I push the button on the handle and ease the door open.
The back is empty except for Kezia, a red handprint on her cheek but her eyes are defiant and there are no tears.
“You okay, baby?”
“I am now,” she answers, scooting across the bare metal floor of the van interior and stepping out beside me. “I tried to get away, but with two of them I couldn’t.”
“It’s okay. You did your best.”
I pull her behind me, the turmoil raging inside me that her age is in question. But right now, her safety is paramount. I’ll deal with my own problems later.
“You have violated my daughter, kidnapping and more, I’m sure. Your life and career are in ruins and you cannot take her from me.”
“You’re full of shit,” my father interjects.
“Her birth certificate is in my back pocket. See for yourself.”
I nod toward my father, giving him the go ahead to retrieve the piece of paper on which my career, life and reputation hang. What’s printed on there will be entered into evidence. I’ll have to stand in court while they read it out.
My father slips out an aged, white folded paper, my mother, Margaret and Summer all gathering around him while I keep my gun on the two men and Kezia moves next to the group, taking the paper from my father.
“I’ve never seen this,” she says. “No one ever told me where exactly I was born, or my birthday… And anyway, I’ve counted sixteen summers, I’m positive. How can I remember sixteen summers if I’m only sixteen years old?”
“Exactly,” her father says with a laugh. “Sixteen summers. Sixteen years old.”
“No way. I didn’t start counting before I was one!”
“Look at you?” Her father sneers. “You’re a mutant, but I was going to get top dollar for you, Marco was prepared to pay, but only after he confirmed you were still intact.” Intact. He says it like she’s an animal. “But you’ve ruined yourself. You’re soiled now, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
My father shoves the barrel of his gun right up against Thadius’s nose and he falls silent, shrinking back, as Margaret moves closer, pulling the paper to one side, leaning down while her other hand covers her lips.
Her eyes dart to me, then the men, then at the paper, and finally at Kezia.
“She’s not sixteen.” Margaret snarls at the two men, then fixes her eyes on me. “She’s not sixteen, Merrick.”
“What do you mean? How do you know?”
“Because, she’s my daughter.”
It’s pushing mid-night as I sit, looking out at the moon, stroking Kezia’s hair as she sleeps with her head on my lap.
I don’t have the heart to move her and possibly wake her because she’s had one hell of a day. I have too, and Margaret and Summer…
Life is stranger than fiction, for sure.
After I called for back-up and we took Thadius and his side-kick Marco into custody, we got down to figure out what the fuck was really going on.
We pieced things together the best we could.
With info from Margaret and Kezia, it looks like Margaret was right. Kezia is her daughter. Summer’s fraternal twin.
The allergies were one clue, but Kezia’s unique brown/blue eyes apparently were her biological father’s genetic anomaly as well.
Those things could have been coincidental, but then Margaret laid out the facts surrounding the home for unwed mothers where she gave birth, and the name of the doctor, which matched the information on Summer’s birth certificate.
When the doctor falsified Kezia’s birth certificate, he didn’t think to change the fact that Kezia was a fraternal twin. The birth year was changed in another forgery attempt by her family in order to try to frame me, but in the end there was more proof to show they were the criminals and when the district attorney gets finished with them, they won’t be moving around and playing their games for a very long time.
The list of crimes committed since the birth of Summer and Kezia went on and on and the people Kezia was sold to by the doctor do this for a living, so after some investigating, there wasn’t much doubt.
What I do know for certain, is my babygirl is here to stay. I’ll do everything in my power to help her adjust to the changes and new information about how her life began and, in the end, I know it was all meant to be.
Some cosmic plan set in motion long ago to bring us all here to the same place and settle each of our souls in its own way.
