Page 81 of SEAL'S Baby Surprise

It’s a divorce decree.

He very carefully steps away from the table with all the papers and pictures. Then he picks up a kitchen chair and whacks it so hard against a filing cabinet that it breaks.

“Richard!” Aunt Kandis cries out. “What’s wrong?”

“That asshole!” he yells. “That double-died, sheep-dip, dirty asshole.”

My dad comes hurrying over, looks at the papers, and says, “Well, I’ll be. I had no idea that some of the Lanes were Dutch.”

I look at Mama Lee. “Dutch?” I ask.

“Dutch colonists in Africa,” she says. “One of those murky pieces of history from the days when the sun never set on the British Empire. The colonial period has cast a long shadow over currenthistory, and it seems that our family is somehow connected to it. Now, some of the pieces that were in that stupid prenuptial agreement that I did not sign begin to make some sort of sense.”

“What agreement?” I ask. “I didn’t think you and Daddy did that.”

“We didn’t,” she says. “Your Daddy says everything he has is mine, and that everything that I have is mine, too. But there was this guy who tried to get me to marry him before your Daddy found me. And he wanted me to sign one. There was some stuff in it that didn’t make sense, but now it does. I think that Andrew, Richard, and I have a half-brother we didn’t know about.”