Chapter 8 - THE RESULT
The DNA result arrived on Friday morning.
I opened it at the kitchen table.
Sophie was eating pancakes.
She had insisted on cutting one into the shape of a rabbit.
I read the page once.
Then twice.
The probability that I was Sophie’s biological grandfather was greater than 99.9 percent.
I set the paper down.
Sophie looked up.
“Is it bad?”
“No.”
I could barely speak.
“No, sweetheart.”
“Does it say I’m yours?”
I moved beside her chair.
“It says we’re family.”
She considered that.
“We knew that.”
A laugh escaped me.
Then a sob.
She looked alarmed.
I pulled myself together.
“You’re right.”
She dipped pancake into syrup.
“We already knew.”
Dennis had been excluded as her biological father.
I was genetically her grandfather.
There had been only two sons.
Dennis.
Michael.
The conclusion no longer required imagination.
Michael had a daughter.
Michael had died without knowing.
For six years, I had believed I had lost his entire future with him.
But part of him had been sitting at my Christmas table.
Calling me Grandpa.
Holding my hand.
Laughing with his eyebrows.
I went into the bathroom and cried where Sophie could not see me.
Not because she was Michael’s.
Because I had needed a laboratory to force me to notice what Claire had once tried to tell me with a single sentence.
If something happens to me, you’d still see her, right?
That afternoon, Rosa came over.
She brought a bag of groceries and refused reimbursement.
Sophie ran to her.
That was new.
Rosa knelt and hugged her.
“Look,” Sophie announced. “Grandpa is really Grandpa.”
Rosa glanced at me.
I nodded.
Her eyes filled.
Later, while Sophie played in the yard, Rosa stood beside me at the sink.
“I need to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I saw Claire hide that paper.”
I turned.
“The paternity report?”
Rosa nodded.
“When?”
“Years ago. Sophie was a baby.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know what it was.”
She twisted the dish towel.
“Claire was crying. She asked me if Dennis had come home. I said no. She carried a folder upstairs.”
“The attic?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“Nothing.”
“Rosa.”
She looked ashamed.
“Dennis came home early.”
My stomach tightened.
“I heard them arguing.”
“About what?”
“I couldn’t hear everything.”
“What did you hear?”
Rosa stared out the window.
“Claire said, ‘You promised you would fix it after the distribution.’”
My pulse quickened.
“What did Dennis say?”
“He said, ‘It’s done. You want Sophie to grow up poor because Michael got you pregnant before he died?’”
I gripped the counter.
“Are you sure?”
“I remember because I didn’t understand what he meant.”
“Anything else?”
Rosa nodded slowly.
“Claire said the money belonged to Sophie.”
There it was.
Not inference.
Not coincidence.
The shape of the fraud had existed inside that house for years.
“And Dennis?”
Rosa’s face changed.
“He told her she should be grateful.”
“For what?”
“For giving Sophie his name.”
I looked toward the yard.
Sophie was kneeling in the grass, making the stuffed rabbit jump over a line of stones.
My son had taken Michael’s child.
May you like
Taken Michael’s money.
Then convinced the child’s mother that the theft was a favor.
