During the time we’d lived in Piersville, family of the heart had become our real family, so Shanti had a lot of aunts and uncles who adored her. She’d known I was taking a DNA test, and I’d explained briefly what the results would mean Jeremy was to us. Apparently, it hadn’t escaped her notice that the difference between him and her other uncles was the DNA relation.
In the grand scheme of things, DNA meant nothing to me. I had a family now that loved me when my own hadn’t, so tell me where DNA made a difference there?
But to Shanti, this was huge.
And my heart broke into tiny pieces.
In an ideal world, she’d still have her parents, and Callum would be here introducing her to Jeremy as well. Sadly, life was never perfect, so we had to make of it what we could. Life also sometimes threw a curveball at us, taking people away that we thought we couldn’t live without, and giving us other people who’d love us just as much.
My half-brother was taller than even Callum had been. Jeremy’s height had definitely come from Jeremiah, who stood at almost seven feet tall. He was also half African-American, and all of the women in Piersville had drooled over his photo when I’d showed it to them.
What made him truly stand out was that he had one blue eye—a shade of blue that was the same color Callum’s had been.
And as he picked up Shanti, holding her tightly with his eyes on me, it felt like someone had smoothed silk over the cracks in my heart. They’d never be healed entirely, grief and hurt didn’t work that way, but they weren’t as jagged now.
“Give me my granddaughter, kid,” Jeremiah ordered, reaching out for Shanti when she suddenly straightened up and clasped Jeremy’s face in her hands, misjudging the speed and force of it and slapping both his cheeks at the same time.
Technically, there was no relation between Jeremiah and Shanti, but she’d decided he was her grandpappy the second she’d meet him on a FaceTime call. If Jeremy was her uncle, he was her grandad, there were no ifs and or buts, not that any of us would have tried to argue it with her.
Not missing a beat and completely on the same wavelength as Shanti, Jeremiah’s response had been, “Damn right, I am.”
Jeremy passed her over with the type of care someone who hadn’t spent any time around kids did—like she’d break if she touched the air and no one was holding her. I half expected him to tell Jeremiah to support her head like you did with a newborn.
Once he was sure she was safe with his dad, he turned back to me, this time with a look of uncertainty on his face.
“Can I hug you?”
Like he had to ask twice. In a move that wasn’t too far away from Shanti’s, I flew across the gap separating us and wrapped myself around him like a spider monkey. We’d spent months getting to know each other over FaceTime, but I’d been unsure about how this first proper meeting would go. I’d worried over nothing.
Lowering his head, so his mouth was closer to my ear, Jeremy whispered, “I hope he’d have liked me. If he was anything like his daughter, I reckon he’d have ended up being one of my favorite people.”
There wasn’t one thing that could have stopped me from crying at those words. Not even a hurricane sweeping past us could have done it.
Tipping my head back, I took in my brother. The pain was there, one of us was missing and would never get to enjoy what we were to each other, but there was also a lot of happiness. My mom had fucked up nearly every step of her path through life, but the one thing she’d done right was to give birth to the three of us.
At the end of the day, the way we felt about her was her loss, and when Jeremiah and Jeremy had found out how Callum and I had grown up, they’d wanted to visit Mom at the prison she was incarcerated in. I’d only told them about what she and Dad had tried to do with Shanti after I’d made them promise that they wouldn’t visit her.
Suffice it to say, finding out that his soon-to-be ex-wife had tried to sell his ‘granddaughter’ had tipped him over the edge. That had been the deciding factor in him claiming Shanti as his grand-baby and agreeing to go to show and tell with her as soon as it could be arranged.
He had his reasons for not doing everything he could to dissolve the marriage to Mom before now, and I respected the fact he didn’t want to divulge what they were, but she’d now been served the papers in prison, which blew my mind. Hopefully, he’d get that freedom soon.