Chapter 14

Adrian POV

Morning came but I hadn't slept and I knew Elena hadn't either because I'd heard her moving around in her room all night, the same way she'd probably heard me pacing in mine.

I got up and showered and got dressed and avoided looking at myself in the mirror because I didn't want to see my father's face staring back at me, didn't want to think about whether Elena had that same face too.

When I came out of my room, Elena was in the kitchen making coffee but she didn't look at me when I walked in, just kept her eyes on the counter like it was the most interesting thing she'd ever seen.

"Coffee?" she asked quietly.

"Yes."

She poured a cup and set it on the counter without handing it to me, keeping as much distance between us as possible, and I picked it up and went to sit in the living room because being in the same room as her was too hard right now.

I could feel her watching me but when I glanced back she was looking away again and we stayed like that for an hour, in different rooms but aware of each other, not speaking because what was there to say.

The DNA results wouldn't come until this afternoon and until then we were stuck in this horrible situation where we couldn't touch each other or look at each other or acknowledge the almost-kiss that had happened right before my father dropped his bomb.

If we were siblings then everything we'd felt was wrong, everything we'd done was wrong, and I didn't know how to process that so I just didn't.

I opened my laptop and started searching for information about my father's past because I needed to know if what he'd said was true or if it was just the ramblings of a dying man trying to cause chaos one last time.

It didn't take long to find what I was looking for because my father had been careless or maybe he'd wanted to be found out eventually.

Photos in an old company archive from twenty years ago showing employees at a Christmas party and there in the background was my father with a woman who looked exactly like an older version of Elena, both of them standing too close and smiling at each other in a way that made it clear they were more than colleagues.

I zoomed in on the woman's face and saw Elena's eyes and Elena's smile and I knew without a doubt that this was her mother.

"Elena," I called.

She came into the living room slowly like she was approaching something dangerous. "What?"

"Come look at this." I turned the laptop toward her.

She walked over and looked at the screen and I watched her face go pale. "That's my mother."

"And my father." I said.

"When was this taken?" She asked me.

"Twenty years ago at a company Christmas party." I scrolled through more photos and found another one of them together, this time talking in a corner away from everyone else. "He wasn't lying about the affair."

Elena sat down hard on the couch like her legs couldn't hold her anymore. "I can't believe this, I can't believe my mother would do this."

"The evidence is right there."

"I know but it doesn't feel real, it feels like some nightmare I'm going to wake up from." She looked at me. "What do we do?"

"We wait for the DNA results like we planned." I said, trying not to sound anxious .

"And if they come back saying we're related?" She asked me.

"Then we annul the marriage and pretend this never happened." The words tasted like ash.

"Can we do that? Can we just pretend?"

"We'll have to." I closed the laptop because I couldn't look at those photos anymore. "There's no other option."

Elena stood up and started pacing the same way I'd paced all night. "I need to look through my mother's things, maybe there's something there that can tell us the truth before the results come."

"What things?"

"Her belongings, the stuff from the house that I packed away after the funeral, I haven't gone through most of it yet." She was already heading toward her room. "Maybe there's a diary or letters or something that explains what happened." She said.

"Do you want help?"

"No, I need to do this alone." She disappeared into her room and I heard her opening boxes.

I sat there in the living room and tried not to think about the fact that we might be siblings, tried not to think about how we'd almost slept together yesterday, tried not to think about anything except the next minute and then the next.

An hour passed and then Elena came back carrying an old leather-bound book that looked worn and used. "I found her diary."

"What does it say?"

"I don't know, I couldn't bring myself to read it alone." She held it out to me. "Read it with me?"

I took the diary and opened it to a random page and saw handwriting that looked like Elena's but older, more settled. The date at the top was from twenty years ago.

"Start from the beginning," Elena said.

"No, let's find entries from around the time of the affair." I flipped through until I found the right year and started reading entries from that period.

Most of them were mundane, talking about work and Elena's father and everyday life, but then I found one that made me stop.

"What is it?" Elena leaned closer to read over my shoulder.

I read it out loud. "Richard Blackwell is persistent, keeps asking me to have dinner with him, keeps finding excuses to talk to me alone, but I'll never be his because my heart belongs to another and I won't betray that no matter how charming he thinks he is."

"So she rejected him?" Elena asked.

"In this entry, yes but let's keep reading." I turned the page and found more entries about my father pursuing her and her rejecting him and then suddenly the tone changed.

"I made a mistake," I read. "I let Richard take me to dinner and I drank too much and I ended up in his hotel room and I hate myself for it but I can't take it back now, I can just make sure it never happens again."

Elena made a small sound and I glanced at her but kept reading.

The next few entries were full of guilt and shame and eventually a decision to end things with my father and focus on her marriage and her life, and then one entry that made my blood run cold.

"The baby isn't his," I read slowly. "I made sure of that."

Elena grabbed the diary from my hands. "What does that mean?" I asked, guess it's my turn to be surprised.

"I don't know,let me keep reading." Elena said.

She scanned the page and then read out loud. "I was terrified when I found out I was pregnant because of the timing but I counted the days over and over and I'm sure, the baby isn't Richard's, the baby is my husband's and that's the only thing keeping me sane right now."

We both went quiet.

"So you're not his daughter," I said.

"The entry says the baby isn't his but—" Elena looked up at me. "But which baby? Me or a sibling I don't know about?"

I took the diary back and read the entry again looking for clarification. "It doesn't say, it just says 'the baby' but doesn't specify who."

"I don't have siblings." Elena's voice was shaking. "I'm an only child, my parents only had me."

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Of course I'm sure, don't you think I'd know if I had a brother or sister?"

"Not if they gave the baby up for adoption or—" I stopped because Elena had gone completely pale.

"Do I?" she whispered. "Do I have siblings I don't know about?”