Chapter 8 - THE PATERNITY TEST
Daniel refused.
His attorney called the request irrelevant to our divorce.
Rachel disagreed.
“If Daniel used marital funds to support a child he believed might be his, that belief matters.”
Daniel’s attorney insisted Daniel had only been helping an old friend.
Then Chloe provided another screenshot.
Daniel had written it three weeks before her delivery.
If he looks like me, we won’t need a test.
I stared at the message in Rachel’s office.
My body felt cold.
“He told everyone the baby belonged to her ex-husband.”
Rachel nodded.
“Apparently he told Chloe several different things.”
“What does she say now?”
“She says she genuinely doesn’t know.”
That was not the answer I expected.
Chloe had been separated from her husband when she reconnected with Daniel.
For a short period, she had been seeing both men.
According to her, Daniel knew.
According to Daniel, he had never slept with her during the possible conception window.
According to the messages, Daniel had worried about the exact opposite.
The court eventually ordered a test because financial support and potential paternity had become tangled with the marital assets in dispute.
Daniel delayed twice.
Then he complied.
The results took nine days.
Those nine days were stranger than the months before them.
Daniel began sending photographs of our early marriage.
Our first apartment.
A camping trip in Vermont.
A terrible birthday cake he once tried to bake for me.
He wrote beneath one photo.
We were happy once.
I stared at it for a long time.
He was right.
That was the cruelest part.
Bad marriages are easy to explain when every year was bad.
Ours had not been.
There had been laughter.
Trips.
Inside jokes.
Sunday coffee.
The time he drove three hours through a snowstorm because my mother’s pipes froze.
The night he slept on a hospital chair after my appendix surgery.
Those memories were real.
So were the betrayals.
One did not cancel the other.
Rachel called on a Tuesday morning.
“The results are in.”
I closed my eyes.
“Tell me.”
“Daniel is not the father.”
I sat back.
For a moment, I felt something I could not name.
Relief, maybe.
Not for Daniel.
For the baby.
One child would escape being permanently tied to his scheme.
Then Rachel said, “But Chloe’s attorney sent us something else.”
“What?”
“A voice recording.”
My eyes opened.
“Of Daniel?”
“Yes.”
The recording had been made during an argument two weeks before Chloe gave birth.
Chloe had started recording because Daniel was frightening her.
His voice came through the speaker clear enough to recognize immediately.
If the baby isn’t mine, we don’t tell Jennifer.
Chloe asked why.
Daniel answered.
Because I need Jennifer to believe he might be.
I looked at Rachel.
“What?”
She pressed play again.
This time I heard every word.
Daniel had never needed Chloe’s child to be his.
May you like
He only needed me to think the possibility existed.
And suddenly his financial plan made even more sense.
