“Oh, yes you do,” Crawford said softly. “When were you going to use it, Joe? When no other options were left open to you?”
“What are the two of you talking about?” Grace asked.
Crawford said, “You want to tell her, Joe?”
The older man made a dismissive gesture. “He’s talking nonsense.”
“No, it makes perfect sense,” Crawford said. “Until just now, you didn’t know that I knew. You’ve been waiting for just the right moment to spring it on me.”
“Knew what?” Grace asked with increasing impatience.
Joe looked over at her, and his jowls relaxed. The fire in his eyes dimmed. He looked like a commander who’d been trapped in his own well-set ambush.
Grace said, “Joe? What?”
But when her husband didn’t say anything, Crawford gave her a sad smile, then looked into Holly’s eyes. “I’m not Georgia’s father.”
Chapter 34
Holly’s lips parted in disbelief.
Grace covered her cheek as though she’d been struck.
Joe walked over to the recliner and sat down heavily.
Crawford addressed Holly. “Under oath, I never referred to her as my daughter. You can check court transcripts. I never even refer to her that way in conversation. Other people do, and I never correct them, so technically, I guess that’s lying, because I didn’t father her.”
“How long have you known?”
“Since she was a year old. Beth told me the morning I left that last time for Halcon. She didn’t want me to go. I insisted that I had to, that I had a job to finish. The argument turned ugly. She wanted to hurt me in the worst possible way. And she did.”
Grace, openly crying now, covered her mouth to hold back a sob.
“Who was the father?” Holly asked.
“Nine months, give or take a week, before Georgia was born, I was supposed to have come home for a weekend. At the last minute, something came up, I had to stay in West Texas. Beth was furious. She rounded up a few girlfriends and they went out. Got a little crazy. She met this guy at a bar and slept with him to punish me. Two weekends later, when I did come home, we had lots of makeup sex, so I had no reason to think the baby wasn’t mine. Beth chose her moment to tell me.”
“Which is why I question it,” Holly said. “Maybe she made all that up, just to try to keep you from going after Fuentes.”
Crawford looked over at his father-in-law, and, feeling the weight of Crawford’s stare, he said, “It’s true.”
“And you’ve kept this from me?” Grace said.
“Beth came to me in confidence,” he said defensively. “She found out she was further along in the pregnancy than she was supposed to be, realized what had happened, panicked. She came to me asking what she should do. She was upset with herself. Mortified, actually. She didn’t want it to destroy her marriage. She wanted you,” he said to Crawford, “so I advised her never to tell you. Until now, I didn’t know she had.”
Crawford said, “She claimed she’d never seen the guy before that night, and never saw him after. Didn’t even remember his name. Is that true?”
Joe gave a curt nod. “It was a classic one-night stand.”
That relaxed the tension that had been gripping Crawford for days. “I hoped she was being truthful about that. This past week, there were times when I wondered if Otterman had been the man.”
“Oh, Crawford.” Holly reached for his hand and squeezed it hard.
“Actually, that’s what I feared most. My biggest relief wasn’t seeing him dead, but learning that he had nothing to do with Beth, nothing to do with Georgia.” His voice cracked when he spoke her name. “I ventured a lot of guesses about Otterman, but that was the worst of them. I don’t know how I would have borne knowing that… Well, it doesn’t matter now.”
He walked over to where Grace was sitting and hunkered down in front of her, covering her tightly clasped hands with his. “Don’t ever think badly of Beth. I had made her unhappy. She made one misstep. She loved Georgia. She loved me. I know she did.
“Just a few days after that quarrel, she got the call that I’d been wounded. Maybe she felt like she’d jinxed me, caused me to get shot, something. I think that’s why she was trying so hard to get to me that night. She wanted to make things right between us.”
“Would you have forgiven her?”
“Yes. I have forgiven her. Because I loved her, too. As for Georgia, she became mine when the doctor handed her to me seconds after she was born. I couldn’t love her more if I had fathered her.”
Joe stood up. “But you didn’t. She’s our blood, not yours. So many times, I’ve wanted to hit you with the truth. I hate that you denied me that pleasure.”
“I didn’t.” Crawford came to his feet and faced him. “Beth did.”
“You thought it was your secret to keep, and you’ve kept it.”
“To protect Beth from being scorned. By you and Grace, by anyone.”