As though his suspicion had stained me somehow.
One night, while I fed Mira in the nursery, Dylan appeared quietly in the doorway.
“She really doesn’t have my eyes,” he murmured.
I nearly laughed from disbelief.
“She’s three weeks old.”
He ignored that completely. “When can we do the test?”
The bottle slipped slightly in my hand.
“You care more about proving me guilty than bonding with your daughter.”
“I need peace of mind.”
“And what about my peace of mind?”
He didn’t answer.
That silence told me everything.
So I agreed to the test.
Not because I owed him proof.
But because I was tired.
Tired of defending myself against accusations.
Tired of Colleen’s whispers.
Tired of waking up beside a man who looked at me as though I had betrayed him.
The appointment was scheduled for the following week.
—
The clinic was painfully bright and smelled like disinfectant.
A nurse swabbed Dylan’s cheek first, then mine, then Mira’s tiny mouth while she fussed softly in my arms.
“It’ll take about a week for results,” the nurse explained.
Dylan nodded.
I said nothing.
On the drive home, he tried twice to speak before giving up.
That evening, I overheard him talking to Colleen on the phone.
“She agreed to it,” he said quietly.
A pause.
“No, she hasn’t admitted anything.”
Another pause.
Then his mother’s voice became loud enough for me to hear through the receiver.
“She will. Women like that always do.”
Women like that.
I stood frozen in the hallway while rage spread through me like fire.
Something shifted inside me then.
Until that moment, I had focused entirely on proving my innocence. But suddenly another question appeared in my mind.
Why was Colleen so invested in destroying me?
Not suspicious.
Certain.
There was certainty in her cruelty.
And certainty usually came from fear.
—
A few days later, I went looking for old photo albums.
At first, I only wanted pictures of my grandmother to show Dylan. I thought maybe visual proof of inherited features would finally force him back to reality.
Instead, I found something strange.
One photograph showed Dylan as a toddler sitting beside a man I didn’t recognize. The man had deep brown skin, broad shoulders, and unmistakably familiar eyes.
Dylan’s eyes.
I frowned.
The back of the photo read:
“Malik and little Dylan — summer picnic.”
Malik?
I had never heard that name before.
Curious now, I dug through more albums stored in the attic. Most belonged to Colleen. Years earlier, she had dumped several boxes at our house while downsizing.
Inside one dusty box, beneath old birthday cards and faded receipts, I discovered a sealed envelope.
My hands nearly dropped it when I read the label.
CONFIDENTIAL PATERNITY RESULTS.
The date was thirty-two years old.
My pulse quickened instantly.
I knew I shouldn’t open it.
I opened it anyway.
Inside was a faded laboratory report.
Child: Dylan Turner.
Alleged father: Richard Turner.
Probability of paternity: 0%.
I reread the sentence three times.
My heart hammered violently.
Richard Turner, the man Dylan believed was his biological father, was not related to him at all.
I sat back against the attic wall in stunned silence.
Then another realization crashed into me.
Malik.
The man in the photograph.
Suddenly, everything made horrible sense.
Colleen had spent decades hiding her own infidelity.
And now she was projecting her guilt onto me.
I stared at the papers with shaking hands.
Part of me wanted to confront Dylan immediately.
Another part wanted to wait.
Because after weeks of humiliation, emotional abandonment, and accusations, I needed him to fully understand what he had done to me.
—
The official test results arrived three days later.
Dylan insisted we open them together.
We sat across from each other at the dining room table while Mira slept upstairs.
My husband looked pale.
Nervous.
For the first time since her birth, I saw uncertainty in his eyes.
He carefully opened the envelope.
Then he read silently.
Once.
Twice.
His face lost all color.
“What does it say?” I asked quietly.
His lips parted, but no sound came out.
Finally, he whispered, “Probability of paternity… 99.9999 percent.”
The room went still.
He looked up at me, horror flooding his expression.
“I—”
I stood before he could finish.
“No,” I said sharply. “Don’t.”
“Raina, I’m sorry.”
Sorry.
Such a tiny word for such enormous damage.
“You accused me of betraying you.”
“I know.”
“You abandoned me after childbirth.”
His eyes filled with tears. “I know.”
“You let your mother call me a whore in everything except the actual word.”
He buried his face in his hands.
“I made a mistake.”
“No. A mistake is forgetting milk at the grocery store. You destroyed my trust.”
He looked shattered.
