The Child Who Changed Them (Parent Portal 5)

Or...perhaps...he needed to slow down a moment and listen.

Elaina had tried to tell him, multiple times.

He’d had to believe she’d been wrongfully fertilized. Which he should have seen as the incredible long shot it was.

Still, it would have been easy enough to investigate. Had there even been another woman being fertilized that day Elaina had been at the clinic seven weeks before? Was that person now pregnant?

As he was not a patient of the clinic he had no right to that information.

But Dr. Miller did. And if she had any suspicions at all, she’d have followed up. As would Christine Elliott Howe. She’d been there that morning. Greeting him by name as he’d come in.

She’d known.

They’d all known.

Either there was some mind-exploding conspiracy going on, and a helluva lot of medical malpractice, including the addition of a botched DNA test, or...

He was going to be a father?

He’d been around the parking lot twice. Elaina still had not appeared.

Probably talking to Dr. Miller about being pregnant by the wrong man.

Maybe about being pregnant by a man who was losing his marbles.

He was going to be a father? Him?

He’d watched the chain of command on the swab himself, as far as he could go

with it. That DNA had come from him.

Seriously, one tiny little swimmer, in an ocean of thousands, had managed to survive the massacre that went on daily in his body, swim upstream, get past a foreign device meant to prevent it from entering a no-trespassing zone, meet up with an egg, and get it on?

What were the odds?

What an incredible little fella. He should be proud of that one.

Standing by Elaina’s car, a black, newer-model, high-end, small SUV, he still realized he was failing to grasp the magnitude of what he’d just been told. He heard the words in his mind. Repeated them. And then got lost.

Why would he have been able to do it for Elaina in that moment? She didn’t even want him. He hadn’t been able to do that for Wendy...

He knew Wendy had left him because of how their life goals began to diverge, but he also knew the root of those changes between them had grown from his infertility. Her need to have her own biological child had bloomed, as had his constant trying to make things better for her. He’d driven her nuts with his trying.

But if he’d been able to give her the child she’d wanted...

And now here was Elaina...breaking up with him and then getting his child?

His child?

His child?

He was going to be a father.

Good God. He was going to be a father.

Finding his own vehicle, Greg got in. Drove to the beach. Parked facing the ocean. And let the tears roll.

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