Page 109 of Ruthless Claim

Nine years ago.

Fuck. The math works.

“He doesn’t know about you,” she continues. “I told him his father didn’t know he existed. That if you had known⁠—”

She pauses and something passes through her face but is quickly put away.

“He’s started asking more questions lately. He’s at that age,” she explains, a bit defensively. I nod dumbly because all that keeps going through my mind is “I was pregnant when you left Belfast.”

She reaches into her bag and takes out a photograph, sliding it across the table. I pull myself out of my racing thoughts to look at it.

It’s a photograph of a boy, roughly around eight years old.

He sits on a stone garden wall, with a rolling green field behind him.

The sun is low and bright and he’s squinting into it. He isn’t quite smiling but looks like he’s deciding whether to.

My eyes drink in his features.

He has light brown hair, cut short, and sticking up a little where it’s grown out.

Even though he’s squinting, I can see that he has brown eyes.

He has a strong jaw for a kid.

I pick up the photograph.

The hair is wrong. Mine’s auburn. His is lighter. The eyes are hers completely.

But the jaw. I know that jaw.

The set of the shoulders. The mouth, pressed into a flat, thoughtful line.

I know that expression and now I’m looking at it on the face of an eight-year-old boy sitting on a garden wall somewhere in Ireland.

I put the photograph face down on the table.

“We used protection,” I say levelly, maybe even a little accusatory. I always used protection when I had sex. That was a non-negotiable.

Not even the girl saying she was on birth control would convince me.

You can never trust anyone, and I certainly wasn’t going to be on the hook for some bastard for the next eighteen years.

It turns out I wasn’t careful enough.

“Yes.” She meets my gaze. “I know we did. These things happen.”

I want to argue the point, but I also know she’s right. “I need a paternity test,” I tell her in an uncompromising tone.

She nods, as if she expected this. “Of course. Whatever you need.”

“Before anything else,” I continue firmly. “Before any other conversation about anything.”

“Okay.” Her hands loosen slightly on the coffee cup, like that was the part she was braced for and she’s got through it. “I’m not offended by that. I figured you would ask for something like that.”

I look at the photograph face down on the table. I don’t pick it up again, but I want to pick it up again.

“What’s his name?” I ask, suddenly wanting to know everything about this boy, but also not wanting to know too much.