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My expression darkened.

“Sometimes, he seems like he hasn’t changed at all.”

Mom gave me a long, hard stare, but it was tinged with empathy.

“I don’t know, honey. I understand there’s a lot more to this than you’re letting on, but I do hate to pry. However, I think that you have to tell Michael that Damon is his child.”

“Mom, come on… he’ll just think I’m trying to use it to manipulate him.”

“It doesn't matter. He might think that, and he might not. The fact of the matter is, no matter what happened between you and Michael, he hasn’t done anything so terrible he doesn’t deserve to know his own child…”

She arched her graying brows at me.

“Has he?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Breaking up with me and even firing me aren’t really justifications for not letting him know he has a secret love child.”

“It’s just the right thing to do,” Mom said. “There’s no excuse anymore. If you were going to try to use your child to get money or influence over Michael, you would have done it a long time ago. It should be clear to Michael that you’re not like that. I mean, he seems like a smart enough fellow except that he never should have let you go.”

I sat there for a long time while she knitted and Damon played in the other room. I didn’t speak to her. I just took out my phone and brought up my contacts list. My finger hovered over the button for a long moment, and then I pressed it.

“Hey,” I said as soon as Michael picked up. “We need to talk.”

Chapter Seventeen

Jenna

“It’s good that you called. We need to discuss the situation at hand.”

I froze halfway through Michael’s office door. He knew what was going on? Already? My mind flashed through a dozen scenarios of how Michael could have found out the truth about Damon.

Then I realized that Michael’s tone was all wrong. It wasn’t a ‘grave personal matters tone,’ it was a ‘pure business’ tone. Did that mean he treated vital family stuff like business matters?

Confusion reigned in my brain until I realized that he had just assumed I wanted to talk about the merger business.

I decided that I should probably play along with that assumption for the time being. I entered the office, feeling strange. It wasn’t the late hour, it was more like I was here on personal business but now financial matters were taking center stage. I had brought my body and mind to work, but not ‘to work’ and now I had to reset.

He gestured at one of the empty seats at his desk. I settled into the chair and naturally looked at his computer screen. He had three videos in small windows open on his desktop. I recognized the names. Chad, Trent, and Blake. His three goonies on the merger squad.

“What’s all of this, then?” I asked, gesturing at the screen.

“This,” he said, sensual lips twisting with distaste, "is me trying to go over the interviews I conducted with my team members so I can figure out who leaked the information about the merger to the press and then robbed me.”

He shook his head and scowled.

“Did you find out if one of them was connected to it in any way?” I asked.

Michael’s steely gaze flicked over to me.

“No, not yet. I’m almost mad at them for their seeming innocence.”

“They didn’t break under your interrogation, huh?” I asked with a chuckle.

“No, they did,” he said coldly. “They did break. They would have told me if they had been somehow connected.”

He sat back in his chair and transfixed me with his gaze. The lines at the sides of his eyes seemed more pronounced now. I thought that he must have been at work for quite some time without a break.

“I didn’t just look at these three. I’ve spoken to anyone and everyone who’s ever been in spitting distance of the safe, even tangentially. There’s been no such luck.”