Chương 3
Victoria’s fingers went cold.
“And then?”
“I asked for proof.”
“Of course you did.”
Daniel looked at her.
“I thought it was a mistake.”
“So you found Lauren.”
He hesitated.
That was enough.
“How?”
“The clinic wouldn’t identify her. Their outside counsel wouldn’t either. I hired someone.”
George leaned across the table.
“You investigated my daughter?”
Daniel did not answer him.
Victoria almost admired the symmetry.
She had done exactly the same thing to Daniel.
Daniel continued. “I found Lauren. I found Noah. I had a DNA test done.”
Lauren stood so quickly the stroller rocked.
“What?”
Daniel raised both hands.
“I used a cup he’d been drinking from.”
“You stole my baby’s DNA?”
“I needed to know.”
“You stole his DNA.”
George moved around the stroller.
Reyes opened the door from outside. “Everything okay?”
“No,” Lauren said. “But nobody’s hitting anybody.”
Victoria almost closed her eyes.
Bennett asked Daniel, “What did the test show?”
Daniel looked at Victoria.
“That he was mine.”
“And mine?” she asked.
“I didn’t test for you.”
Bennett’s expression changed.
Victoria caught it.
“What?”
Bennett looked at Daniel. “You knew more than paternity.”
Daniel said nothing.
Arthur opened the folder again and removed a laboratory report.
“The test Daniel commissioned was not a simple paternity test. It was a kinship panel using archived genetic data from the original embryo workup.”
Daniel’s voice went hard. “Arthur.”
“The panel identified both intended genetic parents.”
Lauren sat back down very slowly.
Victoria stared at her husband.
“You knew.”
“Yes.”
“You knew he was mine.”
“Yes.”
“For eighteen months.”
Daniel swallowed.
“Yes.”
No one spoke.
Outside, the storm continued without concern for them.
Noah dropped his pacifier.
It landed on the stroller blanket.
Lauren picked it up, wiped it automatically on a cloth clipped to the handle, and put it in the side pocket instead of giving it back.
Victoria watched her do it.
A practiced mother’s gesture.
No hesitation.
No performance.
Daniel said, “I was going to tell you.”
Victoria turned her head.
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“I know.”
“You watched me pack the nursery away.”
His face tightened.
That had happened fourteen months earlier.
The room came back to her in pieces: tissue paper, painter’s tape, the gray rabbit lamp she could not throw out. Daniel had carried boxes downstairs while she sat cross-legged on the rug pretending she was deciding what to donate.
He had known.
“You took the crib apart.”
“Victoria.”
“You knew where our child was, and you took the crib apart.”
“I thought telling you would destroy three lives.”
She stared at him.
“Which three?”
Daniel looked toward Noah.
That answer was worse than whatever he might have said.
Victoria collected her handbag from the floor.
“I want copies of everything.”
Bennett shook his head. “I can give you your records. Not Lauren’s.”
“I want my records, both transfer identifiers, all communications involving Daniel, and every document I’m legally entitled to.”
“You’ll have them.”
“And the second transfer?”
Bennett’s pause changed the temperature of the room.
“There is a second patient number.”
“Do you know who?”
“No.”
“Can you find out?”
“Possibly. Not tonight, and not without involving counsel.”
Victoria looked at Daniel.
“Did you know there were two?”
His silence lasted half a second too long.
Her stomach dropped.
“Daniel.”
“I knew there was a second discrepancy.”
Lauren covered her mouth.
George said, “Jesus Christ.”
Victoria stepped toward her husband.
This time Reyes entered before anyone could move.
“That’s enough.”
Victoria stopped.
Daniel remained seated.
“What did you do?” Victoria asked him.
“I asked the clinic.”
“And?”
“They said the second transfer had no confirmed live birth.”
Bennett shook his head.
“That isn’t what the recovered records say.”
Daniel looked at him.
Bennett placed two sheets side by side.
“One resulted in a documented positive pregnancy. Lauren’s. The second file was marked as an early loss in the electronic system. But the paper transfer ledger contains a notation that does not match the electronic chart.”
“What notation?”
“OB follow-up transferred.”
Victoria did not understand.
Bennett explained.
“It usually means the pregnancy continued beyond the fertility clinic’s care and was handed over to an obstetric practice.”
Noah had begun humming to himself.
A tiny, tuneless sound.
Victoria placed both hands on the table to steady herself.
“So my other child may be alive.”
“Yes.”
Daniel said, “May be.”
Victoria looked at him.
He immediately regretted it.
She could see that.
“Get out.”
“Victoria—”
“Get out of the room.”
Reyes stepped aside.
Daniel stood.
For a moment he seemed about to argue. Then he removed the passport wallet from his jacket and set it on the table.
“The flight’s canceled,” he said to Lauren.
Lauren looked at him as if she had never seen him before.
“I don’t ever want you arranging anything for me again.”
Daniel nodded once.
He left.
Victoria did not watch him go.
That night, she did not return to the penthouse she shared with Daniel.
She checked into a hotel twelve blocks from her office under her assistant’s name, ordered tea she forgot to drink, and sat on the carpet beside the bed with Bennett’s copies spread around her.
There were eleven pages.
She read them until the letters stopped becoming words.
Two cryostorage identification numbers.
Two transfer dates forty-eight hours apart.
Two recipient codes.
One matched Lauren’s file after Lauren had signed a limited release at the airport.
The other was Patient 6442.
No name.
No address.
No child.
At 1:14 in the morning, Victoria found herself searching the internet for the developmental milestones of two-year-olds.
She closed the browser.
Opened it again.
“What do two-year-olds remember?”
She did not know why she typed it.
The results were useless.
At 1:37, Daniel knocked on her hotel door.
She knew it was him because he knocked twice, paused, then once.
He had done that since they were dating.
She did not answer.
“Victoria.”
She sat on the carpet.
May you like
“I know you’re in there.”
Of course he did. His name was probably still on some account she had forgotten to separate.
