“I’m pregnant. With a baby that is half a man’s that doesn’t want him. Now, I would appreciate it if you got out of my house,” I ordered.
“This house was bought and paid for by your grandfather,” she snapped. “I…”
“It’s in my name,” I said. “Because Granddad wanted to make sure that we both had something when he passed away. There’s nothing you can do about it now.”
Her eyes lit with an inner fire. “Well you can kiss your trust fund goodbye.”
“You can keep it from me right now since I got pregnant out of wedlock, but you can’t keep it from me forever. It will be mine eventually. And even if you were able to find some random loophole, you couldn’t keep it from me.” I rolled my eyes.
She hissed out a breath.
She hadn’t known that I knew that.
Which was funny as fuck because it’d been her husband that told me.
The man that had been the only shining star that had to do with my grandmother.
Our Granddad had been gone for eight years now, and not a day went by that I didn’t miss him.
But he made sure that my grandmother couldn’t hold our trust funds over our heads like she was doing now—at least not for long.
Whether she liked it or not, that money was mine in a year and eleven months.
“We’ll see about that,” she snapped. “Greevis. Time to take me home.”
I rolled my eyes and watched as my grandmother strolled proudly out of my sister’s house. Greevis, her driver and altogether helper for anything she might ever need, gave us a look that clearly said ‘sorry.’
I waved him away and then waited until the door shut before my sister looked at me. “I’ll help if you need it. She didn’t cut me off.”
I rolled my eyes. “If I don’t touch it, it’ll all the more money in the long run. Granddad invested it well.”
Fran looked down at my stomach. “I can’t believe you’re pregnant.”
I placed my hand on my belly.
It was still flat, but it was hard and very unusually weird feeling from the inside, so I knew that the pregnancy test was true.
If all was correct in my calculations, then I was twelve weeks along.
That meant that I knew the exact day that the baby was conceived.
“Did you really talk to Bayne?” she asked.
Bayne Green, the hot shot country star that’d been spawned by Paris, Texas, was my child’s father. And he didn’t want anything to do with my baby.
To the point that, when I’d called him, he’d offered me money to ‘take care of it’ and then had hung up the phone.
“I did,” I confirmed. “But when he found out, he told me to ‘take care of it’ and then sent me a few abortion clinics in the area.”
Her eyes rolled. “I swear to God. How did you step into that pile of shit?”
“Bayne is hot, and I had my beer goggles on that night,” I defended myself, then I let her have it. “I wasn’t having a good day. The day that I got pregnant, I was at that bar because of you,” I explained. “You’d had a bad day. You’d had a panic attack in the grocery store, and you wouldn’t calm down, so I had to force feed you your anxiety meds. And…I just wanted to escape for a while. Which was why I was at that bar that night. Why I slept with the guy in the band.”
Her eyes went haunted for a few seconds, then she dropped her head and looked at her hands. “Shit.”
Shit was right.
Not wanting to pour salt on a healing wound, I hoped to distract her with my next words.
“Sadly, I have to go to work.”
My sister grimaced.
“I wish you still worked there,” I sighed. “It sucks without you.”
“I know,” she admitted. “But it was toxic after the ‘incident.’”
It was.
My sister had worked at the hospital with me as a nurse on the same floor, but an error on another nurse’s part had made it to where she couldn’t handle being there anymore, so she’d left.
I’d stayed because right around the time that I’d decided enough was enough, nobody fucked with my sister, I’d found out that I was pregnant. And, knowing my Grandmother’s attitude was going to be this particular outcome, I’d made the difficult decision to stay at the hospital. Only after having the conversation with my sister, though.
She’d decided that I didn’t need to leave because of her dealings with the hospital and the staff—not that I agreed—but ultimately I took her assurance that she would be okay with me staying to heart.
My sister and I did not lie to each other.
We were the only thing each other had.
“What time is your appointment?” she asked.
I looked at my watch.
“In thirty minutes. Do you want to go?” I asked.