Page 89 of When the Smoke Clears

I don’t have the heart to tell her I don’t drink tea, and food sounds horrible right now. I let her fuss with the kettle while Gabe clatters in the kitchen, making himself useful in a way that produces more noise than results.

“Are we still calling it the ‘Villain Board’?” I call, lowering myself onto the slate-gray couch. My body tries to argue. I win with a groan.

“‘Murder Board’ is too aggressive,” Isla says from the counter.

“It’s aggressive because murder is aggressive,” I murmur.

Gabe snorts. Isla shoots me a look that could pin a man to a wall and walks over my comment like it’s a rug.

She sets a mug on the table—steam curling, mint rising—then kneels beside the pharmacy bag and lines up the bottles with a nurse’s neatness.

Painkillers. Stool softeners. Antibiotics. Gabe snickers; she ignores him, and for a sliver of a moment, the cabin pretends we’re normal people.

“Let’s look at your paperwork,” she says, scooping the discharge packet. She settles on the edge of the coffee table, ankle tucked under, brow furrowing in concentration. Her fingertip traces columns, finding what matters in a thicket of abbreviations.

I let my head fall back, my eyes half-closed, and listen to the house. The kettle ticks as it cools. Wind fingers the trees. For the first time in days, my lungs fill all the way up.

Then Isla goes still. A pause that doesn’t belong to a page. Her eyes narrow. Her lips part, then snap shut. Her hands flatten on the table like she needs the wood to keep her from floating up.

“What?” My pulse leaps—the primitive response that hasn’t had a break since this started. “Isla?”

She doesn’t look up. When she does, the color drains from her face. “Your blood type.”

I blink. “What about it?”

“It says AB negative.”

“Yeah,” I say slowly. “Rare as hell. I remember the lecture I got when I got a cut on my head while wrestling with Chase when we were kids. Why?”

Her finger jabs the page, then another. “Because both your parents got tested when you needed blood.”

“And?”

“They are both listed as type B.”

Silence drops, heavy and immediate. I stare at her. She stares back.

“That means…?” I ask, even though the math is already writing itself in black marker across my skull.

Her gaze locks on mine, no soft edges left. “It means there’s no way Nathaniel Wild can be your biological father.”

CHAPTER 21

ISLA

A deep crease etches into Luke’s forehead, his eyebrows knitting as he absorbs the weight of my words.

“Is there any way they made a mistake?” he asks, voice rough.

I glance back at the stack of paperwork spread across the table, even though I already know the answer. I went through these results three times before I opened my mouth. Every value, every notation, every signature. There’s no room left for wishful thinking.

“It’s…improbable,” I say.

The words taste bitter. I hate being the one to tell him this, especially now, when he’s already hanging on by a thread—and when he was finally, finally starting to find some kind of uneasy truce with Nathaniel.

Luke stares at the floor, jaw ticking. “Why would no one have ever told me?”

“Maybe they didn’t know?” Gabe suggests from the other side of the table, though even he doesn’t sound convinced.