Page 35 of Oxygen Deprived

“Okay,” she took a deep breath. “This right here shows the likelihood of me being related to him.”

She pointed to a number.

It read: 99.99%.

My mouth dropped open.

“That’s impossible unless…”

She was nodding before I had a chance to finish.

“Exactly,” she said. “So I started to dig. I hired a private investigator to find out how. After running the test two more times.”

“How, at eighteen, were you able to afford this?” I questioned.

She shrugged.

“My parents are wealthy, and when I turned eighteen, a small inheritance hit my account. I blew through it so fast my head spun, and I only have a few things to show for it,” she sighed. “Anyway, so I have this man trying to figure out why, and when he comes to me with the news that I was conceived through artificial insemination from a sperm bank out of Dallas, it all started to make sense.”

“So they froze your father’s…sperm.”

She nodded again emphatically. “That’s what I think, anyway.”

“And have you ever figured anything else out about it, or did you stop once you’d gotten that far?”

She shook her head.

“That’s the shameful part of all this. I went through a hundred and fifty thousand dollars trying to figure it out…but I’d gotten shafted by the PI. He’d taken me for a naïve girl, and I had been,” she admitted.

I shook my head.

“That’s ludicrous.”

She agreed with a grunt.

“But I count it as worth it…to know. I just wish I could have more information without bringing it up to my mom. This would break her for sure,” she whispered, picking at invisible lint on her shirt.

A shirt that was clinging to her breasts like a fucking second skin.

My eyes jerked up to her face, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw she wasn’t paying attention to where my eyes were aimed.

She was too busy looking at the fire.

Her hands wringing in her lap as she thought about what she’d just told me.

“What is it?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I want to tell Downy, but I’m scared he’ll tell my mom. Then my father will leave,” she hesitated. “Again. My mom—she tried to leave him once for doing some stupid shit when it came to Downy a few years ago—but she couldn’t function. When he got done serving his sentence, she went back to him. This is the last thing they need right now—me making it harder than it needs to be.”

“You’re thinking like a kid,” I told her. “Think like an adult. You deserve to know who your father is. Why are you so worried about your parents? They’re adults, too.”

She pursed her lips, thinking long and hard before she gave voice to the words that were just at the tip of her tongue.

“My father’s what you would call…difficult,” she finally settled on. “He’s not the nicest person in the world, and he’s just an okay father. Not great, but not the worst either. I wasn’t beaten. I never wanted for anything. Not a day went by that I worried if I would eat the next day, and I always had a roof over my head and a place to sleep.” She exhaled. “But he’s mean. Very mean, and it’s my mom who ends up taking the brunt of it if we do something that displeases him.”

“Take it, how?” I wondered.