Page 52 of Coyote

I sat down in one of the chairs, “Well?”

He got right down to it, “I know you and Bethany have been getting close recently, especially after the fire.” I nodded, “I saw you playing happy families earlier.”

“Is that a crime? I like Bethany, I like her daughter, they’re a package.”

“Her daughter,” Breaker said darkly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I take it she’s not told you who the baby daddy is yet?” my brother-in-law said as he glanced at the piece of paper between his thumb and forefinger.

“No, and I’m not rushing her, she’ll tell me when she’s good and ready,” I ran my fingers through my hair in exasperation. Breaker didn’t realize that Bethany had a lot of trauma from what happened to her before she took off. I hadn’t told anyone about the rape, as I figured that was her business. They only knew that she upped and left me.

“Surely you aren’t that fucking blind, brother?” he said as he paced across the floor.

“Are you on about that again? I told you, she got pregnant after she left here. I think she hooked up with a guy in LA, she told me she worked as a live-in housekeeper at a motel, I wondered if maybe it was the owner, and she was embarrassed—”

“Fucking bullshit!” he exclaimed, and threw the piece of paper down on the desk in front of me.

“What’s this?” I asked, my eyes glanced over the page, it looked like a printout of some sort.

“Read the last fucking line,” Breaker said.

“The probability of Mr. Reyes being the biological father of Vanessa Marks is greater than 99.9%.”

“DNA don’t lie.”

“What?” I said, my heart felt like it was racing in my chest, and nothing was making any sense.

“She lied to you,” Breaker spat out.

“But she—”

“She fucking lied to you, she’s been keeping your kid from you all these years. You ever wonder why the bitch crawled back into your life now you’re opening your own business? She’s wanting fucking child support.”

“No,” I protested. “No, Bethany isn’t like that. Besides that, don’t you remember? Callie and her boss cooked up the idea to get us back together.”

“Maybe he was in on it too, or he wanted rid of her, maybe he even set the fire as a way to get her out of his place?”

My brother-in-law had lost the plot, “That’s just crazy. He wouldn’t set his own fucking house on fire just to get rid of the woman who lives in his fucking pool house,” I growled.

“Are you defending her? After what she did to you?”

I shrugged, now the adrenaline was wearing off, my head was clearing slightly. I was a father, I was a fucking father. That sweet little girl was mine.

“She must have had her reasons,” I countered, then I had another thought. “Anyway, how did you get this?”

“Does it matter?” Breaker asked.

“Of course it fucking does!”

“The morning we cleared out her place at her boss’ pool house, I got Mace to go ahead and snag anything he could find that might have the kid’s DNA on it. Got her hairbrush and sent it off to the lab with a sample from you,” he said. At least he had the good grace to look embarrassed at getting a sample from me, though I dreaded to think what they’d sent.

“Fucking hell, I’m really not sure what to think about this, it’s totally blindsided me.”

“I can well imagine it, brother,” Breaker said patting me on the shoulder.

I sat there shaking my head, staring at the piece of paper in disbelief.