The moment that he’d woken up from surgery and been ‘himself’ again, he’d cried. He’d cried big, hulking tears and apologized to me over and over again. He did that for an entire month until finally I pulled him to the side and explained that I’d forgiven him.
But right now? I was mad at him all over again.
It wasn’t fair.
I wanted kids…and I wanted kids with Theo.
And I’d never have them.
That saddened me more than I would ever be willing to admit.
“Oh, I got to take a bite of Jessica’s cupcake at lunch a couple of days ago,” Linnie chattered. “It was so good. And it was five days old. She found it in her mom’s car in a plastic bag. Her mom told her not to eat it because it was so old, but Jessica brought it to school anyway. Her mom was wrong. It wasn’t bad.”
I looked down at the little cherub holding my hand and decided that I’d need to give her a lesson in why five days was too long to go to be able to safely eat something that’d been left in the car.
Gross.
“Ummmm,” I said. “How about you don’t do that anymore.”
Theo started to giggle softly at my side, then could no longer contain it and started laughing in full.
I watched her laugh and felt the sadness from earlier start to dissipate.
Between her and Linnie…I had all that I would ever need.
I was certain of that.
***
“Any idea why your brother would say that he needed Tara or you?” I asked.
Theo shook her head.
“No,” she said quietly, trying to keep her voice down so she didn’t wake Linnie who’d just gone to sleep—finally—after her major sugar rush from this afternoon. “I have no idea…but I’m going to find out.”
My phone rang in my pocket and I grinned at it.
“Maybe you won’t be needing to find out at all,” I said as I pressed the green phone icon on my phone. “Hello?”
“So I found out what it was,” my private investigator said. “When you called, something niggled at my brain, and I started doing some digging. Had a friend help me.”
I frowned. “Okay, so what was it?”
“It’s actually kind of funny when you think about it,” he said. “The mother left both girls her fortune. If one twin died, it went to the other twin. Passed down through the generations of females. The boys and husband were excluded from anything that the mother left. The little niggle that I remembered was reading an article in the newspaper about twenty-five years ago. A millionaire’s wife died and left her fortune to her two girls. Two girls that were too young to take care of the estate. Father had to go to court to get appointed guardianship of their estate, and the court denied him. Assigned a lawyer in town as their appointed guardians. Last I ever heard of it until today.”
My brain was racing with all the implications of what he’d just told me.
“Your girl has about five hundred and ninety million to her name,” he continued.
I wondered if Theo had been aware of her money—which I highly doubted—and if she understood the implications of it all. Which was even more unlikely.
“Thanks, man,” I said. “And did you find anything about the dad?”
“I thought he might leave to go bail out the kid, but he didn’t,” he answered. “Been watching his house for about three hours now, and not a single thing has happened. A couple of the people that work on the estate have come and gone, but ultimately he’s still holed up all alone.”
I sighed. “If that changes, please let me know.”
He grunted out an affirmative and then hung up, causing me to drop my hand from my face and toss the phone onto the couch cushion between me and Theo.
Theo was leaning against the arm of the couch, a cup of coffee in one hand and a rather large blueberry muffin in the other, staring blankly at the television screen.
“You hear any of that?” I asked her.
She turned to study me. “Most all of it. He talks really loud.”
She looked sick to her stomach, which caused me to pull her into my arms, coffee, muffin and all. She immediately shifted so that she could place both items on the coffee table before turning fully in my arms, her hands smoothing up my chest to come to a halt on my shoulders.
“I’m so sorry about your sister, baby.” I pressed my lips to her head. “My guess is that your father latched onto the one kid he knew he could control.” I blew out a frustrated breath. “The PI is going to do a little digging into this situation, but I think that you’ve just found your reason for being treated like absolute dirt for your entire life.”