Chapter 15

Elena POV

I couldn't breathe and the room was spinning because I might have siblings I didn't know about and my mother had kept secrets that were destroying my entire understanding of who I was.

"We need to find out," Adrian said and he was already pulling out his phone. "Do you have your birth certificate?"

"Yes, it's in the box with all my important documents, why?"

"Because if your mother had another baby there might be records, hospital records or adoption papers or something that can tell us what happened." He was typing on his phone. "Where's the box?"

"In my closet." I stood up but my legs felt shaky. "I'll get it."

I went to my room and pulled the box down from the top shelf and brought it back to the living room where Adrian was pacing again, and I opened it and started pulling out papers until I found my birth certificate.

"Here." I handed it to him.

He looked at it and then back at me. "You were born in March, what month was the diary entry about the pregnancy?"

"I don't know, let me check." I grabbed the diary and flipped back through the pages until I found it. "June, she wrote about finding out she was pregnant in June."

"And you were born nine months later in March so the baby she was talking about was you." Adrian sat down and ran his hand through his hair. "So you're not Richard's daughter."

"But then why did the diary say 'the baby' like it was someone different?" I sat down next to him. "And why did she mention the baby multiple times in other entries?"

"Let me see the diary again." He said.

I handed it to him and he started reading through all the entries from that year, and I watched his face change as he read, watched him get more and more tense until he stopped on one page.

"What is it?" I asked.

"This entry is from two years before you were born." He turned the diary so I could see. "Read it."

I read out loud. "I can't keep her, I'm not ready to be a mother and Richard won't leave his wife for me and I can't raise a baby alone so I'm giving her up for adoption, I'm signing the papers tomorrow and trying to forget this ever happened."

My hands started shaking. "She had a baby before me."

"A daughter, two years before you were born." Adrian kept reading. "And from the timeline it looks like she had the baby during the affair with my father."

"So I have a sister."

"A half-sister who was given up for adoption and who you've never met." He closed the diary. "And if that baby was my father's then she's not related to you by blood."

I looked at him and the relief that flooded through me was so intense I felt dizzy. "If your father's baby was my mother's first daughter and not me, then you and I aren't related."

"We still need the DNA results to confirm it." He said but I could hear the relief in his voice.

"But the diary says the baby she kept wasn't his, the baby she kept was her husband's, and I'm the baby she kept." I grabbed his hand without thinking. "Which means I'm not your sister."

"We don't know that for sure yet, Elena, the diary could be wrong or your mother could have been lying to herself or—" I cut him off

"Or she was telling the truth and we're not related and we've been torturing ourselves for two days over nothing." I squeezed his hand. "I have a sister I never knew about and she might be your half-sister but I'm not."

Adrian looked down at our hands and I realized I was touching him for the first time in two days and he wasn't pulling away. "We still need to wait for the results." He still persisted.

"I know but at least now we have hope, right? At least now we know it's possible we're not related."

"It's possible." He turned his hand over so our palms were touching. "God, I hope you're right."

We sat there on the couch holding hands and not talking because there was nothing to say until the results came, and I realized how much I'd missed touching him even though it had only been two days.

"I missed you," I said quietly.

"It's been two days." He said amused.

"I know but it felt like forever, felt like we were miles apart even though we were in the same apartment." I moved closer to him on the couch. "I hated not being able to look at you."

"I hated it too." His thumb brushed across my knuckles. "I kept thinking about the kiss and how everything got ruined right when we were finally being honest with each other."

"Maybe it wasn't ruined, maybe we just hit pause." I said trying to convince him but mostly myself.

"Maybe." He looked at me and his eyes were softer than I'd seen them in days. "Or maybe my father destroyed everything like he always does."

"He's dead, Adrian, he can't hurt us anymore."

"Can't he? He's the one who told me you might be my sister, he's the one who set up this whole situation in the first place." His jaw tightened. "Even dead he's still manipulating everything."

"Only if we let him." I squeezed his hand again. "Only if we believe what he said without proof."

We sat there for another hour just holding hands and talking about nothing important, about the weather and what to have for dinner and anything except the DNA results that were coming, and it felt good to just be with him again without the weight of potential incest hanging over us.

Then the doorbell rang.

We both froze.

"That's probably the result," Adrian said.

"Already? I thought they weren't coming until later."

"I paid extra for rush processing, I wanted to know as soon as possible." He stood up but didn't let go of my hand. "Do you want me to get it?"

"We'll go together." I said.

We walked to the door still holding hands and Adrian opened it but there was no one there, just an envelope sitting on the doormat with a medical company's logo in the corner.

He picked it up and we both stared at it.

"This is it," I said.

"This is it." He turned the envelope over in his hands. "Whatever's in here is going to tell us if we can be together or if we're related and everything we've felt is wrong."

"Open it." I told him.

"I don't want to." He answered pulling back.

"Neither do I but we have to know, we can't keep living in limbo like this." I reached for the envelope. "Give it to me, I'll open it."

He handed it to me and I ripped it open before I could change my mind, pulled out the papers inside and started reading the medical jargon that I didn't understand.

"What does it say?" Adrian asked.

I scanned down to the bottom where the results were and the words blurred together and my hands started shaking so badly I dropped the paper.

Adrian grabbed it before it hit the floor. "Elena, what does it say?"

I couldn't answer because my brain had stopped working and all I could do was stand there staring at him while the world tilted on its axis again.

"Elena, talk to me, what do the results say?”