I flopped back into the couch cushions, my brain reeling with the intrusive thoughts that were hammering me from all sides.

My dad had a six-week-old son.

My half-brother had a heart defect and was an orphan.

My parents were dead. Hell, I was an orphan.

Was this what my parents had been talking about when they’d crashed their car into a guardrail on the freeway? The police had said they’d lost control, but had it been because my parents were fighting over his affair?

An affair with someone young enough to have a baby?

I’d thought my parents had been happy. They’d loved each other for as long as I could remember, like a true kind of love. They’d often danced together in the kitchen. My dad still used to slap my mother on the ass when she gave him coffee in the mornings.

They’d loved each other. But this baby was proof that maybe they hadn’t, really. Maybe it had all been a lie.

“I understand this is a lot for you to take in, Nova. You don’t have to give me an answer now.”

I was mad at my father, which was odd, because fifteen minutes ago, I would’ve never thought I could picture his face without feeling grief. But now I thought about him and this orphaned baby, and I felt angry.

But not angry enough that I would give up a remaining piece of him. That I would set someone else adrift in the world when I could give them a past, a history. Not so mad that I’d forsake the last person in the world who shared my bloodline, let him go to a family who might not be able to pay for his heart problems, or let him sit in foster care because surgeries were too expensive and no one wanted him.

I shook my head at Janette Fischer. “I don’t need to think about it. Tell me what I need to do to adopt him.”

Chapter Two

NOVA

Preparing for a newborn was not an easy task. There was a reason you had to use the whole nine months pre-birth to get prepared.

Chloe had driven home after I’d called her in hysterics. We’d spent that first night drinking wine and eating ice cream, and I’d cried my eyes out. Bawled like a baby. Chloe had cried too, because she’d spent as much time at my house, with my parents, as she had her own.

The betrayal of my father cut deep, and still, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It felt like a lie, but Mr. Lief had sent me a copy of the baby’s birth certificate, and right under the title of Father, was my dad’s name. His date of birth. This address.

There was no mistaking it.