Chapter 7 - The Second DNA Test
Thirty-eight days after Ivy was born, my second uterus began contracting.
By then, Ivy no longer needed help breathing. She stayed in the NICU gaining weight while I lived one floor above, still pregnant with her brother. Every morning a nurse wheeled me to her incubator. Every evening Dr. Cole monitored the baby inside me. We'd managed to give him five additional weeks.
Then his heartbeat began slowing.
Dr. Cole entered my room at 3:08 a.m. in surgical scrubs. "Simone, we need to deliver him."
"He's only thirty-one weeks."
"He's showing signs of distress. Keeping him inside is now more dangerous than delivering him."
This time I didn't call Marcus. Teresa stood beside me while the nurses prepped the operating room.
My son was born by emergency C-section at 4:02 a.m. Three pounds, five ounces. For one terrifying second he made no sound. Then a thin, angry cry.
"Felix," I whispered.
By sunrise, my two children lay in neighboring incubators in the NICU, born thirty-eight days apart.
Marcus's attorney requested a DNA test before noon. I consented immediately. A nurse swabbed the inside of Felix's cheek while Marcus watched through the nursery glass. He never asked to touch his son.
The result arrived two days later. Marcus was Felix's biological father with a probability greater than 99.99 percent.
Teresa arranged for the result to be delivered in a private hospital conference room. Marcus entered with his attorney and sat across from us, thinner than he'd been at the ultrasound, confidence intact.
Teresa slid the report toward him. He read the conclusion twice.
Neither baby belonged to another man. Neither conception had happened during an affair. Marcus had come home on May eighteenth, conceived a second child with his wife, and then lied about it to steal control of her company.
"It doesn't change what happened to our marriage," he said.
"No," I replied. "What you did changed our marriage."
Teresa placed the tollbooth photograph beside the DNA report. Then the charter invoice. Then Bianca's sworn statement. Finally, the records of the $2.8 million transfers.
Marcus's expression shifted.
"You used my electronic signature," I said.
"I had authorization to manage company funds."
"Not to transfer them into a private trust."
His attorney leaned in and whispered something. Marcus ignored him. "Bianca is lying because she's angry."
"She gave investigators the security device you used."
Marcus went still. On May eighteenth, he'd entered my father's office while I slept and removed a hardware authorization key from the safe, used it to approve the transfers under my identity, then returned it before leaving. Bianca had kept the device after he'd asked her to destroy it.
"She promised me that was gone," he said.
His attorney closed his eyes. Marcus had just confirmed it belonged to him.
The conference room door opened. Two financial-crimes investigators entered with the hospital's security director, one carrying a warrant to seize Marcus's phone and laptop.
Marcus stood. "You set me up."
"No," I said. "You built this yourself."
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As the investigators escorted him out, he looked through the glass wall toward the NICU. Ivy slept beneath a pink blanket. Felix's tiny hand rested near his face.
Both were his. That truth had arrived too late to save him.
