Some random friend? His words ricocheted through Alexis like an errant pinball, bouncing off vital organs and shredding what was left of the wall around her heart. The crack became a chasm, and it quickly filled in with a feeling she thought she’d buried through therapy and time. A feeling she’d never hoped to feel again after she exposed Royce. It was a desire to hurt someone the way they’d hurt her.

“Oh, I don’t know, Elliott,” she breathed, regretting the words she hadn’t even yet spoken but unable to do anything to hold them back. “From what I’ve heard, your children are often the best match.”

“Excuse me?” Cayden said, his gaze darting back and forth between Alexis and his father.

“What is she talking about, Elliott?” Lauren asked.

“Dad, please, let me explain.” That was Candi.

Cayden exploded this time. “What the hell is going on here?”

Alexis looked to Candi for help, but she was staring at Elliott, who was too busy looking guilty as fuck to be of any use.

“Seriously?” Alexis finally blurted at Candi. “You’re going to make me do this?”

“I—” Candi could barely get a word out.

Oh, for God’s sake. Alexis tossed her hands in the air. “Congratulations, it’s a girl.”

The sarcasm missed its mark. They stared in silence, except for Elliott, who was boring a hole in the floor with his averted eyes.

Alexis sighed and groaned at the same time. “I’m his daughter,” she said. “Surprise.”

She could have tossed a grenade in the middle of the room, and it wouldn’t have done as much damage as her words. There were shouts and hands covering mouths and some swearing, and oops, some tears from Elliott’s wife.

“What is she talking about?” Lauren screeched. “Your daughter?”

Cayden handed the crying baby to his wife but kept his glare firmly on Alexis. “This is bullshit. I don’t know who you think you are—”

“She’s our sister,” Candi said. “I have the DNA to prove it.”

Cayden turned his anger on Elliott. “Is this true? She’s your daughter?”

Lauren let out another sob and whipped around, hands pressed to her mouth.

Elliott finally found his balls and stood up straight. “I didn’t want you all to find out this way.”

“Oh my God,” Cayden breathed. “It’s true?”

Another loud sob from Lauren sent Elliott racing to his wife’s side. He circled to face her. “Honey, please. Let me explain. It was a long time ago.”

“Thirty-one years, to be exact,” Alexis quipped.

Lauren’s eyes widened as her brain did the inevitable math. “We were together then, Elliott.”

“No!” Elliott grabbed his wife’s hands. She yanked them back. “We were . . . It was that summer when we broke up. Lauren, please. Listen to me.”

“It was that woman, wasn’t it?” Lauren moaned.

The words were a slap across Alexis’s face. “That woman was my mother, and her name was Sherry Carlisle, and if you don’t believe I’m his daughter, just look at my eyes.”

Lauren paid no attention to Alexis, her weepy eyes locked on her husband. “She’s the one who called you when you came back from San Francisco.”

Wait. What? Her mother had called him? Alexis stormed forward. “Did—Did she tell you she was pregnant? Did you fucking know about me?”

Apparently the f-word was too much for Cayden’s wife, because she hightailed it from the room with the children.

Cayden brought his rage back to Alexis. “I think you’d better leave.”

“No!” Candi cried. “She’s a match, Dad. I know she is. She got the blood test today, and—”

“Stop this, Candi,” Elliott growled. “It’s not a guarantee. And you never should have brought her here without talking to me first.”

Lauren covered her whole face with her hands and began to wail.

Elliott faced Alexis. “Cayden’s right. I think you need to leave.” He leveled his angry stare at Candi. “I’ll deal with you later.”

Alexis shook her head. “Look, if I’m not wanted here, I have no problem leaving.”

She spun on her heel and retraced her steps on shaky legs to the door. Candi raced after her. “Wait. Please stay.”

Alexis yanked open the front door and pounded down the porch steps. Candi jogged after her and grabbed her arm.

Alexis whipped around. “What the hell was that, Candi? Your mother didn’t even know? How could you do that to me? How could you do that to them?”

“I—I was only thinking about—”

“My kidney. Yeah, I get it.”

“No. I was only thinking about saving my father’s life. Excuse me if I don’t know the proper protocol for all this.”

Alexis clenched her fists and stomped to her car, digging her keys from her pocket.

“Please don’t go,” Candi pleaded.

“He obviously doesn’t want me . . .” Alexis stopped short in horror as emotion clogged her throat at the slip of the tongue. “He doesn’t want my kidney.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s thinking right now. He was just surprised.”

Alexis snorted, pulling open her car door.

“Just wait here, okay? Let me go talk to them some more.”

Alexis slid into the front seat, and just before she yanked the door shut, she said, “Don’t call me again.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

She drove in a fog. Until anger and resentment and the sting of rejection settled into a blessed numbness. Until oncoming cars on the freeway merged into a single blur. Until the nearly constant buzz of her phone on the floor of the passenger seat became a backdrop to the sound of recriminations in her head.

She should have known better.

She should have listened to Noah.

She pictured him in his house, standing in his kitchen with a bowl of whatever he’d heated up for dinner in his hand, shoveling it in as quickly as he could so he could get back to work. Or maybe he was reclined on his couch, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles as he watched a documentary on TV. Or maybe he was at his computer, glasses on his face and his hair standing at wild angles because he’d dragged his hands through the strands too many times.

She’d seen him do all those things. His mannerisms were as familiar to her as her own.

And suddenly all she wanted was him.

It was six o’clock by the time she got off the freeway at the exit that would take her to his house, a two-story Craftsman that looked modest on the outside but was completely remodeled and modernized on the inside. Noah had installed solar panels along the roof, all new electricity and energy-efficiency stuff, and a bunch of other things he’d tried to explain to her once but she didn’t and would never understand.

Floodlights illuminated the shadowed driveway when she pulled in. She’d barely turned the car off before the front door opened. Noah came out barefoot in a pair of jeans and a faded MIT sweatshirt. Every emotion she’d been smothering for the two-hour drive returned in a flood as she slid out of her car.

“Hey,” he said, jogging down his porch steps. “I’ve been trying to reach you. Is your phone dead? What happened?”

Alexis shut her door, met him halfway on the sidewalk, and threw her arms around his waist. He immediately wrapped her tightly in his arms and held her against his chest. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

Alexis pressed her cheek to his warm breastbone, the sound of his heartbeat a reassuring cadence.

“Talk to me,” he said against her hair.

“He . . . He threw me out.”

Noah’s arms stiffened. “He what?”

Alexis pulled away from him and looked up. “He told me to leave. He doesn’t want me or my kidney.”

Noah’s face hardened into something that should have been intimidating but was instead thrilling in its protectiveness. “I should have been with you.”

“I’m glad you weren’t. It was too humiliating.”

Noah took her hand and pulled her up the sidewalk. “Come inside.”

“What were you doing?” she asked, following him back up the porch steps. “Am I interrupting anything?”

“Just my panicked pacing because you weren’t texting me back. I thought you’d gotten in a car accident.”

She laughed quietly, but he turned around at the front door.

“I’m not kidding. I was about ten minutes away from calling hospitals along the freeway.”

“I’m sorry. I . . . I was—”

“It’s okay. I’m just glad you’re here.”

He held open the door for her to walk in first. His house was warm and smelled like pizza. Her stomach growled instinctively.

“When was the last time you ate something?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded toward the kitchen as he shut the door. “There’s some left. I didn’t order any meat in case you wanted some.”

The gesture brought a flurry of butterflies to her stomach and made her heart do the thud-thud thing again. “Thank you.”

“What did I tell you about thanking me too much?”

“Would you rather I take you for granted?”

“I’d rather you get it through your head that I’m here for you, no matter what.”

Alexis toed off her flats and left them by the front door. His house was a standard layout for a Craftsman style. The entryway opened into a long hallway with rooms on either side and a staircase off to the right. There were three bedrooms upstairs, one of which he used as a home office.

The hallway ended in the kitchen, which led to a small dining area where she’d shared countless dinners with him over the past year. The brown place mats she’d crocheted for him during a brief attempt at the craft were piled in the center of the table, unused and mostly unusable. But he’d kept them anyway.