Chương 6
“What did he do?”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
Claire stood again.
Anger made sitting impossible.
“He told me he was trying to help.”
“He may have been.”
“He hid this for eleven days.”
“That can be both.”
Claire hated that answer because it sounded like adulthood.
She ended the call and went into the hallway.
Nora was folding towels on the sofa.
“Richard has a lawyer.”
Nora stopped folding.
“Okay.”
“That’s your reaction?”
“I’m trying not to say everyone in that house is evil because you get mad when I generalize.”
“I do not.”
“You do.”
Claire stared at her.
Nora went back to the towel.
“See?”
Three days later, Richard asked to meet.
Claire chose a coffee shop instead of Hale House.
Richard arrived early and sat at a corner table with a legal pad he never opened.
Without his suit jacket, he looked smaller.
Claire ordered tea.
He ordered coffee and forgot to drink it.
“You have counsel,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Should they be here?”
“No.”
“Does your lawyer know that?”
“He advised me not to discuss matters that could be relevant to the investigation.”
“Good start.”
“I’m not going to discuss laboratory chain of custody or anything Detective Ruiz has asked about.”
“Then why am I here?”
Richard looked at her for a long moment.
“To apologize.”
Claire leaned back.
He did not launch into a speech.
He simply said, “I failed you.”
The simplicity bothered her more than an excuse would have.
“How?”
“Several ways.”
“Pick one.”
“I treated information about your marriage as though it were an estate-management problem.”
“Yes.”
“I delayed telling you about the duplicated result because I believed verification mattered more than the distress caused by uncertainty.”
“It did not.”
“I know that now.”
“No. You knew it then. You just preferred the legal risk.”
Richard looked down at his coffee.
“That is probably fair.”
Claire had expected him to resist.
She felt cheated by the admission.
Outside, a bus stopped at the curb. Two college students came in laughing about somebody named Jonah who had apparently slept through an exam.
Claire waited until they passed.
“Why did Vanessa say you always choose the institution?”
Richard’s face closed.
“You heard that.”
“Everyone heard it.”
He rubbed one thumb along the edge of the cardboard cup sleeve.
“Her first pregnancy.”
Claire said nothing.
“Vanessa was thirty-one. Andrew was still married to her. She miscarried at fourteen weeks.”
“I know she miscarried.”
“You don’t know what happened afterward.”
Claire waited.
Richard’s gaze moved to the window.
“Hale Maritime had a board vote scheduled the following morning. Andrew wanted to postpone. His father refused.”
Claire’s stomach tightened.
“Why?”
“The company was negotiating a refinancing. They believed postponement would alarm lenders.”
“And you agreed?”
“I advised that the vote could proceed without Andrew.”
“That’s not what Vanessa meant.”
“No.”
Richard swallowed.
“She asked me to get Andrew out of the meeting. He would not leave. I told her I couldn’t force him.”
Claire stared at him.
“What kind of meeting?”
“A hospital room conversation.”
“You went to the hospital to tell a man whose wife had just miscarried that he needed to vote?”
Richard said nothing.
“That’s grotesque.”
“Yes.”
The answer came fast enough to stop her.
Richard looked exhausted.
“I was good at my job.”
Claire folded her hands over her stomach.
“And that’s supposed to explain it?”
“No.”
“Then what does?”
“Nothing.”
For a minute they listened to the coffee grinder.
Finally Claire said, “Did Andrew regret it?”
Richard smiled faintly.
“For years.”
“Did Vanessa?”
“She never forgave him.”
“Did you?”
Richard looked at her.
“I’m still working on whether I deserve to.”
Claire left without touching her tea.
The next week broke the family open.
The laboratory audit showed that the second paternity-test request had been created using credentials belonging to Dr. Samuel Keene, a reproductive endocrinologist at North Atlantic Fertility.
Keene denied authorizing it.
His clinic had treated Andrew and Vanessa six years earlier, when they froze embryos during Andrew’s lymphoma treatment.
The clinic had also treated Claire and Andrew two years later.
That overlap became the first fact the tabloids understood.
They got nearly everything else wrong.
One outlet claimed Claire and Vanessa had been implanted with the same embryo.
Another suggested the fetus Claire carried had been “cloned,” which caused Nora to throw her phone onto the sofa and announce that civilization had failed.
The real explanation was less spectacular and more disturbing.
Somebody with access to the clinic’s archived records had known the identifier attached to Claire’s prenatal blood sample.
Somebody had used that identifier to request a duplicate report.
Somebody had then altered the patient name from Claire Bennett to Vanessa Hale.
The printed document Vanessa submitted in probate contained Andrew’s paternity probability from Claire’s genuine test.
It was not a test of Vanessa’s pregnancy at all.
Ruiz called Claire from a parking lot outside the clinic.
“We have access logs.”
Claire was at a grocery store holding a bag of oranges.
“And?”
“Vanessa’s attorney is going to receive the same information soon, so I can tell you this much. A clinic administrator accessed your reproductive file twice after Andrew’s death.”
“Who?”
“Melissa Grant.”
Claire knew the name.
She put the oranges down.
Melissa had been Vanessa’s college roommate.
Claire had met her once at a Hale Foundation gala.
She remembered a woman with short red hair who complained about the fish.
“That’s her friend.”
“Apparently.”
“Is she talking?”
“Through counsel.”
“Of course.”
“Claire.”
“What?”
“Do not contact her.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“You can hear thoughts now?”
“You put down whatever you were holding.”
Claire looked at the oranges.
“That is deeply irritating.”
Ruiz laughed for the first time.
Then her voice changed.
“There’s more.”
Claire gripped the cart.
“What?”
“Melissa accessed Andrew’s archived consent forms too.”
“What consent forms?”
“The ones governing the frozen embryos created during his marriage to Vanessa.”
May you like
Claire’s mouth went dry.
“Are there embryos?”
