Chương 3
She almost smiled.
Peter held out his hand.
Mara looked to Claire for permission.
Claire nodded because whatever came next had already hurt her daughter enough.
“Stay in the kitchen.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t eat frosting with your fingers.”
Mara frowned.
“I don’t do that.”
Peter glanced at Claire.
“She absolutely does.”
For one strange second, the room loosened.
Then Mara disappeared through the kitchen doorway, and the tension rushed back into the space she left.
Claire waited until she heard Peter opening drawers.
“Talk.”
Daniel bent to pick up his overnight bag, then apparently thought better of it and left it where it was.
“I found something.”
“What?”
“Claire, it’s complicated.”
“No, complicated is our insurance company denying the same dental claim three times.”
She pointed at the photographs.
“This is deliberate.”
Denise crossed her arms.
“Maybe let him finish.”
Claire turned on her.
“You’ve had plenty of opportunities to finish.”
“Both of you,” Evelyn said.
Nobody listened.
Daniel pulled his phone from his pocket.
He did not unlock it.
He only stared at the black screen.
“About three weeks ago, Mom was going through Dad’s desk.”
Evelyn sat down abruptly in one of the dining chairs.
The movement was so unlike her that Claire looked at her.
Evelyn Mercer did not collapse into chairs.
She arranged herself in them.
“He had old tax files,” Daniel continued.
“Insurance stuff, estate documents, things we should’ve dealt with after he died.”
Evelyn stared at her hands.
“It was eighteen months.”
“I’m not criticizing you, Mom.”
“It sounds like it.”
Daniel’s jaw shifted.
“This isn’t about that.”
Claire folded her arms.
“Then get to what it is about.”
He looked at her.
“In one of the folders, there was a lab invoice.”
Claire waited.
Nothing in his face helped.
“What kind of lab?”
“A genetic testing lab.”
The refrigerator hummed in the next room.
Someone outside laughed loudly enough for the sound to carry through the windows.
Claire heard Mara asking Peter why birthday candles were kept beside batteries.
“Whose test?”
Daniel glanced toward Evelyn.
“My dad’s.”
Claire looked at Evelyn.
Evelyn’s eyes were wet now, though no tears had fallen.
“And?”
Daniel unlocked his phone.
“He had a paternity test done.”
The sentence entered Claire’s mind and stopped there, disconnected from meaning.
“A paternity test on who?”
Daniel did not answer quickly enough.
Denise did.
“Mara.”
Claire stared at her.
For a moment she genuinely believed she had misheard.
“That’s not possible.”
“It was a private test,” Daniel said.
“What does that mean?”
“Hair samples, I think.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“You’ve known for three weeks and you don’t know exactly?”
“I’ve been trying to figure out what happened.”
“Without telling me.”
“Yes.”
The answer was quiet.
It was also the first clean answer he had given her.
Claire looked down at his phone.
“Show me.”
Daniel hesitated.
“Show me.”
He opened an email and handed her the phone.
The message had been forwarded to him by Evelyn.
There was an attachment with the name of a laboratory Claire did not recognize and a scanned invoice dated almost eight months before Frank Mercer died.
The document listed Frank as the requesting party.
A second identifier consisted only of initials.
M.M.
Claire read the date twice.
Mara had been five.
“What did the result say?”
“We don’t have it.”
Claire looked up.
“You just said there was a paternity test.”
“There was an invoice.”
Denise spoke more softly now.
“And a note.”
Evelyn closed her eyes.
Claire handed Daniel his phone.
“What note?”
Nobody moved.
Then Evelyn reached into the small beaded purse hanging from the back of her chair.
She removed a folded sheet of yellow legal paper.
Daniel stepped toward her.
“You brought it here?”
“I didn’t know what else to do with it.”
“You could have left it at home.”
“I did leave it at home.”
Her voice sharpened suddenly.
“For three weeks.”
That sounded like the Evelyn Claire knew.
Evelyn unfolded the paper but did not offer it over.
Claire held out her hand.
After a moment, Evelyn gave it to her.
Frank’s handwriting slanted hard to the right, impatient even when he wrote grocery lists.
Claire had once teased him that every word looked late for a train.
There were only four lines.
Daniel needs to know.
The dates don’t work.
I had it checked twice.
Evelyn deserves the truth.
Claire read them again.
Her mouth went dry.
“What dates?”
Daniel looked at the floor.
Claire’s eyes lifted slowly.
“What dates, Daniel?”
He shoved his hands into his pockets.
“My vasectomy.”
Nobody in the room moved.
Claire actually smiled because the alternative was making a sound she did not want Mara to hear.
“Your what?”
“I had one before we met.”
“I know when you had it.”
“Claire.”
“I drove you to the reversal.”
Denise looked away.
Claire could still smell the terrible coffee from the surgical center waiting room if she let herself.
Daniel had been thirty-seven and embarrassed by the disposable shorts they gave him.
They had been married eleven months.
They had wanted a child badly enough to turn sex into calendars, temperatures, supplements, appointments, and eventually arguments conducted in whispers because hope had become something both of them could bruise.
The reversal had been successful.
There had been follow-up tests.
Then Mara had come two years later after they had stopped believing every late period meant anything.
“What dates don’t work?”
Daniel rubbed the back of his neck.
“Dad apparently thought Mara was conceived before my follow-up showed viable sperm.”
“Apparently?”
“That’s what we’re assuming.”
“We?”
Claire looked around the room.
“You all sat around assuming when my daughter was conceived?”
“No,” Denise said.
“Do not make it sound like that.”
“What should I make it sound like?”
“Mom found the note.”
“And immediately started removing a six-year-old from photographs?”
Evelyn stood.
“I did not immediately do anything.”
“Congratulations on your restraint.”
“Claire.”
“No.”
May you like
Evelyn’s chin trembled.
“No, you do not get to say my name like I’m embarrassing you.”
