Chapter 2 - The Impossible Report
When we returned to St. Joseph's Hospital, two armed security officers were waiting grimly beside a senior doctor outside a restricted wing.
Nobody explained anything in the hallway. The doctor’s expression was tight, his jaw clenched as he escorted us past the nurses' station and into a private consultation room, clicking the heavy door shut behind us.
Maya remained asleep in my arms, completely oblivious to the rising storm.
Then the doctor turned to me, looking deeply troubled, and asked a question I never expected to hear in this lifetime.
“Mrs. Vance... have you ever donated eggs?”
I stared at him, blinking away the exhaustion. “No.”
“Have you ever participated in fertility treatments or had embryos frozen?”
“Never. We had our three boys naturally.”
His expression tightened further. Then his eyes moved slowly toward Julian.
My husband looked down at the floor, his shoulders slumping. That was the exact moment fear completely replaced confusion in my chest.
“Julian?” I asked, my voice trembling.
He wouldn't look at me.
The doctor placed an initial laboratory report on the table between us. “There was information in the mother's intake history that required us to perform additional cross-checks for identity verification.”
I looked down at the page. My eyes found Julian's name first.
No biological relation.
I looked across the chart. Then I saw mine.
I read the line once. Twice. Three times. My brain flatly refused to process or understand the words printed in black ink.
Parent-child match: 99.9%.
I almost let out a harsh laugh. Not because anything about this nightmare was funny, but because it was biologically impossible.
“This is wrong,” I said, my voice rising.
The doctor remained silent.
“I'm fifty-one years old!” My hands began trembling violently around Maya, and she shifted slightly in her sleep. “I didn't give birth to this baby. I've never donated eggs. I've never frozen embryos anywhere. How can she possibly be my biological daughter?”
Nobody answered. The silence in the room was deafening.
I turned slowly toward Julian. The color had completely drained from his face, leaving him chalk-white under the lights. And suddenly, with terrifying clarity, I understood something far more frightening than the scientific report sitting on that table.
The doctor looked confused. I was terrified. But Julian looked like a guilty man who instantly recognized the dark secret sitting on that page.
“Julian,” I whispered, the air leaving my lungs. “What aren't you telling me?”
Before he could open his mouth to answer—
BANG. BANG. BANG.
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Someone began pounding urgently, furiously on the locked wooden door. Everyone in the room froze in terror.
And Maya suddenly started crying in my arms.
