Bet on Me by Alisha Rai Page B

those features.
    Abruptly, she recalled something Wyatt had said to her when she’d questioned how he could have known Ron was her brother. Do you really think I would confuse your eyes with any other human being on the planet?
    She lightly touched the school photo. “What’s her name?”
    “Ellie.”
    “Nine, huh?”
    “That’s what she said.” Wyatt picked up the photo and placed it between them. “Nine years, four months…twelve days, to be exact.” He fingered the birth certificate. “Elizabeth Anne Caine. Parents are Carol and Samuel Caine.”
    She flipped to the next page to reveal two Arizona driver’s licenses. Samuel Caine had Wyatt’s eyes and coloring, which made sense, given the appearance of the little girl. Tatiana had seen the man from afar when they were kids. Wyatt had never introduced them. For the majority of their relationship he’d been on his own.
    “She showed me a picture of him, too. Holding her as a baby.” The twitch of Wyatt’s jaw was the only sign of emotion. She pressed tighter against his side, as if her body heat could warm him.
    He turned the page, and she leaned farther over his shoulder to read the short bio Jared had scraped together on the small family.
    Samuel Caine had moved to Arizona—she did the math quickly—two years after Wyatt had left him. Worked for the same construction company for the past six years. No arrest record.
    He’d married Carol not long before Ellie’s birth. The wife was a nurse, over a dozen years younger. No criminal record on her either. They lived in the suburbs, in a three-bedroom ranch home they owned.
    A few other pages followed, detailing other parts of their life, like where Ellie went to school and what kind of cars they drove. Wyatt flipped through the papers and then simply stared at the painfully brief data for so long Tatiana felt it necessary to speak. “I guess there isn’t much to go off of here. Once Jared calls—”
    “That’s my father. It’s legitimate.”
    “Maybe—”
    “No. It’s really him.”
    “We can get a DNA test. On him, or Ellie.”
    “No need.” His fingers tightened on the paper a split second before he ripped it clean in two. “No fucking need.” He ripped it again, and again, before dumping the mess on the carpet.
    He grabbed Ellie’s photo. She tensed, prepared for him to tear into it, but he stilled. “Doesn’t matter if she’s his biological kid or not. She’s living with him. I counted the days I could leave him, and now he’s putting some other kid through eighteen years of misery?”
    Speaking past the lump in her throat was difficult. “It was always miserable?”
    “No.” Wyatt bit off the word. “It wasn’t awful before my mom died. They were decent parents, if inattentive. They were so disgustingly in love, they didn’t have much room for me. I don’t know if I was unplanned or what, but I was an afterthought. After she died…” Wyatt shook his head. “He might as well have crawled inside that casket with her.”
    Tatiana’s parents were in love, but she’d never been left in doubt that they desired her. Sure, she’d experienced pangs of self-doubt as a kid about her biological parents, and she’d had to struggle through some angst when her biological mother had made it clear she wanted nothing to do with her as an adult, but how bad would it have been to grow up with people who considered you unworthy of attention?
    “I used to wish he had buried himself, too. On the day of my mother's funeral, when everyone had left, my dad got drunk. He smashed every photo frame in the house, every glass, every casserole some well-meaning neighbor had brought over. I hid in a closet. He screamed it should have been me. That he would have missed me less. He screamed until he passed out.”
    Her breath caught, thinking of a ten-year-old Wyatt hiding in a closet while his remaining parent yelled words at him no child should ever hear from their father. Her arms tightened around