“Elena, before you cry another tear, ask yourself one thing,” she said quietly. “What was in that envelope on the porch?”
I hadn’t even looked. I’d been too broken.
An hour later I sat at the kitchen table with the pages spread out in front of me. It was a DNA test. Walter’s name. The babies’ profiles. A single line at the bottom: probability of paternity, zero percent.
“I never touched another man in my life,” I whispered. “Mom, I swear on those babies.”
Walter threw me and the babies out.
“I know, sweetheart,” Marlene said. “But someone wanted him to believe otherwise.”
My mind went straight to Diane, Walter’s sister. She had never liked me, had never stopped hinting I was after his money, and still had a spare key from the year she stayed with us.
I called her before I could talk myself out of it.
“Diane, Walter threw me and the babies out. He left a DNA test on the porch claiming the triplets aren’t his.”
Silence.
“Elena, I don’t like you.”
“What?” she said at last.
“Did you have anything to do with it? Did you touch anything in our house? Any paperwork? Any envelope?”
“Elena,” she said quietly, “I don’t like you. I never have. But I would never do something like that. Not to three babies.”
“Then who did?”
She hesitated.
“I need to speak with someone about my file.”
“If you want the truth, stop looking at me. Walter had been acting strange for weeks before you gave birth. Whatever this is, it didn’t start with that DNA test.”
The line went dead.
I sat frozen for a full minute. Then I grabbed my keys.
My father drove me to the fertility clinic while my mother stayed with the babies. I walked into the lobby still leaking milk through my shirt, holding the DNA results like a weapon.
“I need to speak with someone about my file,” I told the receptionist. “Now.”
“We were going to contact you next week.”
The administrator who came out took one look at my name on the sign-in sheet and went pale.
“Mrs. Carrow, please, come with me.”
In her office, she closed the door and folded her hands so tightly her knuckles turned white.
“There is an internal review happening regarding your treatment cycle,” she said carefully. “We were going to contact you next week.”
“Contact me about what?”
“This was our mistake.”
She drew a slow breath.
“We believe there may have been an error during fertilization.”
I frowned.
“We believe your eggs were fertilized with another man’s sample.”
