Page 28 of Discretion at Its Finest

The nurse grinned. “Right on target,Dad. He’s growing like a weed.”

For a second, I didn’t even think about it as I nodded in agreement. Then it hit me...Dad.

“Uncle,” I corrected without thinking.

She froze mid-note, blinking up at me. “Oh… sorry. I just—” Her eyes flicked between us, and a faint blush crept up her neck. “You two… look so alike.”

I forced a polite smile, not responding as Eugene slipped his shoes back on. It was a simple coincidence.

“The doctor will be in soon. He’ll just be getting his routine shots today, but we will be drawing blood just to check his low white blood count. It’s nothing major; he’s been doing much better since his infant days, but just to be cautious, Dr. Drake wanted to run those tests.”

The nurse slipped out, the door clicking shut, and we were brought back to silence.

Eugene kept kicking his heels against the chair, his attention still elsewhere.

But my mind clung to that single word still hanging in the air.Dad.

It wouldn’t stop echoing.

I reached for the folder she’d left behind. My hands shook just slightly, the paper crinkling under my thumb as I flipped through it.

Numbers, charts, lines… every measurement documented since birth, written in someone else’s neat handwriting.

Name printed clean across the top:EUGENE NEWMAN.The surname made my jaw tighten as I flipped the page. Height, weight, percentiles. Exactly where he should be.

Right on target, Dad.

The words burned through my mind.

Monitoring for low white blood count. Blood type: O positive.

Just another coincidence: it was the same as mine.

But this wasn’t proof of anything. This didn’t mean anything.

I exhaled slowly, knuckles whitening around the folder.

My eyes found his date of birth. A random date in the spring. One my family didn’t even bother to inform me of. I counted back nine months. That brought me to the last month before she walked away. The last day I had her to myself and before everything burned down… her whisper against my chest, the tremor in her hands when she told me it was over.

I can’t do this anymore, Reid.

Another coincidence, maybe.

I could still feel how her voice cracked when she said it, how she’d pressed her palm against my chest like she wanted to memorize the heartbeat she was about to erase. How she made the decision to leave me for the blanket of safety the Newman family gave her, turning her shoulder to choose Gregory over me.

When they started to push me away, when they cast me out of their precious family… were you already fucking him?

She’d gone still at the question before she wriggled aimlessly in my grip.

Her pulse had jumped beneath my hand, throat working around a silence that told me more than any lie could have.

When you were still with me… when I thought I still had you… were you already with him? Letting him touch you so you could forget about me? So it would be easier to let me leave?

That was only recent. And she hadn’t answered.

Because she fucking couldn’t.

Even now, the silence from that night pressed against the inside of my skull. She had just stared at me, throat working, eyes too wide, the truth sitting there between us.