20. Cillian #2
“Science can be bought,” Emma points out and I bite back a groan. Jesus fuck, not her too. “You know that as well as I do. How much does it cost to bribe a lab tech? To swap samples? To fabricate results?”
I really can’t believe what I’m hearing. “You sound like Valentina.”
“Good. Maybe if you hear it from both of us, it’ll finally sink in.” Emma leans back against the bench, her eyes still on me. “That woman just left. Tell me honestly—did anything about that interaction feel off to you?”
My first reaction is to say no. I want to defend Claire and insist she’s just a struggling, single mother doing her best.
But I can’t.
“She mentioned money again,” I hear myself say. “She’s been mentioning it a lot. And Finn…he asked if they were going to live with me. Said his mother told him we’d be a family.”
Emma nods slowly. “What else?”
“She touched my arm and held on too long. When I pulled away, she played it off like she was just overwhelmed and grateful.”
“Classic manipulation,” Emma says, shaking her head. “Create physical intimacy then backtrack when called out. It makes you feel like you’re reading too much into it.”
I rub my face, suddenly embarrassed I didn’t see that. “You’re going to tell me I’m an idiot.”
“No, I’m going to tell you that you’re being conned,” Emma responds, lightly rocking the stroller. “Cons only work on smart people; idiots don’t have anything worth taking.”
Despite everything, I almost smile. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“It’s supposed to make you wake up.” Emma is quiet. “Can I ask you something? Have you actually looked at the boy?”
My eyes cut to hers. “Of course I did.”
“And what did you see?”
I think about Finn. Light brown hair. Brown eyes. A serious expression that reminds me of...
Nothing. The boy doesn’t remind me of anyone.
“He doesn’t look like me,” I admit quietly, despair settling deep within my stomach.
“He doesn’t look like any Brennan,” Emma says. “And Cillian, our genes are strong. Look at every Brennan you know. We have a type.”
“Claire has dark hair and brown eyes,” I argue, but it sounds weak even to my own ears. “Recessive genes—”
“Are a possibility,” Emma finishes. “But they’re not common.
Especially not when both parents have such dominant features.
” She pauses. “When I was pregnant with Seraphina, everyone joked about whether she’d get his Italian coloring or my Irish.
You know what the doctors told us? With genes this strong on both sides, odds were she’d favor one parent heavily.
And she does.” Emma sighs wearily but looks fondly at the stroller.
“Little missy’s a Leo clone. The Brennan genes lost that battle. ”
Emma moves the sunshade so I can look at Seraphina. She’s sleeping, tiny fists curled near her face and…yeah. She looks exactly like Leo. Poor thing. Maybe she’ll look more like her mother as she gets older.
“Your point?” I tear my gaze away from the baby.
“My point is that if this boy was really yours, he’d probably look like a Brennan,” Emma says gently. “Maybe not obviously but something. The bone structure. The way he carries himself. Something.”
I shake my head. Did Emma pass biology in high school? “You can’t determine paternity by looks.”
“No,” Emma agrees. “But you can determine probability. And that boy? He doesn’t look even remotely like he came from our family.”
Something cold settles in my stomach. I’ve noticed it myself—the lack of resemblance—but I told myself it didn’t matter. Or I thought I saw a resemblance. I thought it was possible Finn took after some long lost relatives, even my own parents.
But Emma’s right. Brennan genes are strong. I grew up hearing stories about it, seeing proof of it in every family gathering.
Hell, my father and Connor could have been twins.
Every Brennan has a variation of auburn hair, a specific jaw structure…
Finn has none of it.
“There’s something else,” Emma says and I have to strain to hear it over the roaring in my ears. “There’s something odd about the way Claire watches you.”
“What do you mean?” I ask numbly.
Emma looks like she’s warring with herself before she makes a decision. “She doesn’t look at you like you’re her ex or Finn’s father. She looks at you like—like you’re a mark.”
“A mark?”
“I’ve seen that look before,” Emma says. “When someone is trying to get something from someone. It’s calculating. Assessing. She’s measuring how much she can push and what buttons to press to keep you hooked.”
I think about the way Claire had touched my arm. The way her eyes lit up when I mentioned the trust fund. The way she’d quickly backtracked about living together when Finn’s comment made her intentions too obvious.
You’re being played, Valentina had said.
She’s running a con, Emma is saying now.
And I, who had spent my entire adult life learning to spot deception, learning to read people, learning to see through manipulation tactics—I’d missed all of it because I’d been too consumed with guilt to see clearly.
“Fuck,” I say quietly.
“Yeah,” Emma agrees. “Fuck.”
We sit in silence. Seraphina stirs in her stroller, making a small noise, and Emma reaches down to rock it gently.
“Valentina asked me to get a second paternity test,” I say. “I told her I’d think about it.”
“And?” Emma looks too eager. Did she put that idea in my wife’s mind?
“And I’m thinking about it.”
Emma’s expression softens slightly. “You really care about her, don’t you? Valentina, I mean.”
“I love her,” I say, and it’s the first time I’ve admitted it out loud to anyone other than Valentina herself. “I love her and I’m destroying what we have because I’m too fucking hardheaded and proud to admit I might be wrong.”
“Then stop being proud,” Emma says. “Get the second test. Hire an investigator. Someone independent who can follow the money trail and find out who’s really behind this.”
“You think there’s someone behind this?”
“I know there is,” Emma says confidently. “That first paternity test came back too fast. The whole situation is too convenient. Someone is pulling strings, and they did it specifically to destroy your marriage to Valentina. The question is why.”
“I need to call Valentina,” I suddenly say, a desperate need to hear her voice. I move to get up, but Emma jerks me back.
“Settle down, lover boy. You need to apologize to Valentina,” she orders. “Then you need to fix this mess. In that order.”
“She might not take my call,” I say glumly, remembering how our last interaction went down.
“She’ll take it,” Emma says confidently. “She’s angry and hurt, but she loves you. Otherwise she wouldn’t be fighting so hard to make you see the truth.”
I pull out my phone and stare at it, my thumb hovering over Valentina’s name.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Emma says, standing up and preparing to leave with the stroller.
“When you call her, don’t lead with excuses.
” She fixes me with a flat look. “Don’t try to justify what you did or explain why you didn’t listen.
Just tell her she was right and you were wrong. Everything else can come after.”
I stare at my cousin in disbelief. “It’s that simple?”
“Ha! No, it’s not simple at all,” Emma laughs. “It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever say. But it’s what she needs to hear.”
She starts to walk away, then pauses and looks back.
“Just…be careful, Cillian. You know as well as I do that in our world, if something seems too convenient, it usually is. And this whole thing?” She inclines her head in the direction Claire had gone. “This is way too fucking convenient.”
Emma walks away, pushing Seraphina’s stroller across the grass toward the parking lot.
I sit alone on the bench, phone in hand, and let everything click into place.
The money talk. The coached questions. The timeline that didn’t quite work. The lack of resemblance.
Claire’s calculating expressions when she thought I wasn’t watching.
The way she’d touched my arm and played it off. The too-fast paternity results.
Valentina had seen it all from the beginning. She had tried to tell me. Had begged me to verify.
And I’d called her jealous. Irrational. Paranoid.
I’ve chosen my guilt and my pride over my wife.
Fuck.
The second crack comes the next day.
I’m meeting Claire at a coffee shop—her suggestion, not mine.
When I arrive, I see her through the window, sitting at a table.
She is on her phone, and her expression is different.
Harder. Almost like she’s scheming?
She doesn’t see me yet, so I hang back and watch.
I’ve found that people show you who they are in the moments before they know you’re watching. And Claire, sitting at the table with her phone in both hands, is someone I haven’t seen before.
Her face is set, hard around the jaw, focused in a way that has nothing soft or overwhelmed about it.
She’s typing something quickly, her fingers flying.
Whatever it is, it requires her full attention.
She doesn’t look up. Instead she types, reads, and types again.
I push through the door.
The movement catches her peripheral vision and she looks up. Immediately, her entire expression transforms. The hardness dissolves, replaced by that soft, slightly overwhelmed single mother persona she always wears around me.
The shift is so dramatic that I almost stop in my tracks.
“You came,” she says, smiling at me.
“I said I would.” I pull out the chair across from her and sit. Before I can stop myself, I nod toward the phone she’s turned face-down on the table. “Who was that?”
A flush moves up her throat and her hand shifts over the phone, sliding it off the table into her lap in a motion she clearly wants to look casual but doesn’t. “Oh. No one. Just—work stuff. Nothing important.”
She’s lying. “That doesn’t look like nothing important.”
“It’s boring.” She laughs lightly, but it sounds off. “You don’t want to hear about my scheduling app.” She sets her hands on the table, and the smile comes back fully now. “I’m so glad you texted. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Finn actually—his teacher pulled me aside this week.”
I lean back. Here we go.