Denise’s silence answered before she spoke.
“Yes.”
My heart lurched.
“What?”
“Robert arranged one when you were six months old. He said he wanted to settle the question.”
I stared at her.
“You told me you didn’t know!”
“I said I didn’t know for certain.”
“Mom!”
She began to cry harder.
“I never saw the final report.”
Robert’s face changed.
I turned toward him.
“You have it?”
He didn’t answer.
“You have a DNA report that could tell me who my father is, and you’ve kept it hidden for twenty-seven years?”
His eyes flashed.
“The report was inconclusive.”
“Then show me!”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“Where is it?”
Robert hesitated.
Marcus stepped forward.
“Tell her.”
Robert looked at him with naked hatred.
“You’ve waited a long time for this moment, haven’t you?”
“No,” Marcus replied. “I’ve spent a long time hoping it would never come.”
Robert reached into his coat and removed his phone.
“I don’t have the original report,” he said. “But I have a letter from the laboratory. I kept it because Denise refused to cooperate with the second test.”
He opened an email attachment and placed the phone on the table.
I leaned forward.
The document was faded and poorly scanned, dated April 2000. It listed Robert Hayes as the tested individual and me as the child.
At the bottom was a statement explaining that the results did not meet the laboratory’s threshold for a conclusive determination.
I read it twice.
“So it doesn’t prove anything.”
“Correct,” Robert said.
“Then why did you leave?”
“Because I couldn’t be sure.”
I looked at him in disbelief.
“You abandoned a baby because you couldn’t be sure?”
“I was twenty-nine, trying to build a business, and terrified of being trapped in a situation I didn’t understand.”
Marcus’s voice was cold.
“You weren’t trapped. You were responsible.”
Robert ignored him.
“I made a mistake. I know that. But I came back now because I want to make things right.”
I laughed, but it came out as a sob.
“Because I’m getting married?”
He looked away.
“Partly.”
“Because you want to walk me down the aisle?”
“Because I want a chance to be your father.”
“You’ve had twenty-seven years.”
“I know.”
He reached toward me.
I pulled my hand away.
“Don’t.”
He lowered it.
For several seconds, the only sound was my mother’s crying.
Then I noticed something strange.
The laboratory letter referenced a second document, one that had supposedly accompanied the report. Its identification number was different from the one on the page Robert had shown me.
I pointed at the screen.
“What is this reference?”
Robert snatched the phone back.
“An administrative number.”
“Then why is there another file attached?”
His expression hardened.
“It’s not relevant.”
Marcus stepped toward the table.
“Robert.”
“Stay out of this.”
“Show her the file.”
Robert locked his phone.
“No.”
That single word told me more than the document had.
He was hiding something.
And whatever it was, he was more afraid of me seeing it than he had been of losing me.
I stood.
“I’m getting a DNA test. An independent one. Today.”
Robert shook his head.
“That won’t change anything.”
“It will change everything.”
He looked at Marcus.
“You’re going to let her do this?”
Marcus met his gaze.
“She doesn’t need my permission.”
My mother reached for my wrist.
“Please, Aaliyah. Whatever the result says, don’t let it destroy your relationship with Marcus.”
I gently pulled away.
“I don’t know what my relationship with him is anymore. I don’t even know what my relationship with you is.”
Her face crumpled.
I walked toward the stairs, but before I reached the first step, Robert spoke.
“If you get that test, you’ll discover something neither of them wants you to know.”
I turned.
“What?”
He stared at me for a long moment.
Then he said, “The question isn’t just whether Marcus is your biological father.”
He glanced at my mother.
“It’s why Denise was willing to let me believe I was.”
Chapter 6: The Woman Who Kept Two Fathers
I didn’t sleep that night.
At three in the morning, I sat on the floor of my childhood bedroom with the hospital photographs spread around me. The house was quiet except for the occasional creak of the heating pipes.
I kept returning to one photograph.
Marcus stood beside my mother’s hospital bed, holding me in his arms. Denise’s fingers rested against his wrist. They weren’t looking at me.
They were looking at each other.
I’d spent my childhood believing that photograph captured the beginning of my family.
Now I wondered whether it had captured the end of another one.
At six thirty, my phone buzzed.
A message from Daniel: Are you okay? You haven’t answered any of my calls. I’m coming over.
