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“I’m a fucking asshole.”
“And a hypocrite. You’re keeping Kensi away from Laura.”
My head flew up. I rubbed my stiff fingers and puffed a breath into my hands.
“Who told you?”
“Emma. She had to cry on somebody’s shoulder. Tom and Alice Young confirmed it. Come into the house; it’s nearly freezing.”
I took my mother under her arm, and we walked across the backyard.
“We fought about Kensi during dinner before Tiffany came downstairs.”
“I saw.”
“They said Kensi looks just like Laura when she was a little girl.”
“And you said nothing to Laura. Isn’t it hypocritical to keep the girl from her mother? A mother who never wanted to give up her baby?”
Fuck.
This couldn’t be happening right now. The way out of this mess was definitely not with the heavy head full of whiskey I was carrying.
“Tiffany is her mother,” I said, pushing open the back door for my mother.
She filled the kettle with water and lit the stove. “We both know what Tiffany did. She purchased a child on the black market.”
“I didn’t know that at the time.”
“Don’t give me excuses. It’s a child, and you should have looked over the paperwork.”
“There was no paperwork.” I rubbed the back of my neck.
“Well, that should have been your first clue.”
For nine months, Tiffany had pretended to be pregnant. We weren’t living together anymore, so it wasn’t like I ever saw her without her clothes on. One day she came home from the hospital without a stomach and with a baby in her arms: my baby. I never questioned whether Tiffany had given birth, and I didn’t find out the truth until Kensi became sick and the doctors asked us about family history. By then, I loved Kensi like she was mine and wanted to give her the family she deserved.
“If I’d reported Tiffany, the only one who would have suffered would have been Kensi. She needed a family, and I already thought of her as mine. I couldn’t give her up, Mom. I can’t do it now, either.”
My eyebrow twitched. My mother passed me a cup of cooling tea.
“Tiffany gave Kensi her liver,” I said.
“Who?”
“Tiffany. She was the anonymous donor.”
My mother puffed out a frustrated breath. “And you call yourself a private investigator? I thought your father taught you better.”
“Let me guess. Tiffany’s not the anonymous donor?”
I watched as my mother’s face brightened.“And you know who it is.”
“It’s Kensi’s biological mother.”
Laura.
“She never had an appendectomy?”
