My entire body went cold.
“You tested my DNA without telling me?”
“Claire, listen to me.”
“What did you do?”
He handed me the paper.
This time I took it.
I did not understand most of the numbers.
But I understood the sentence beneath them.
The tested individuals are excluded as biological parent and child.
I read it again.
Then again.
My lips moved silently.
“This is wrong.”
Marcus said nothing.
“I gave birth to her.”
“I know.”
“I carried Lily for thirty-eight weeks.”
“I know.”
“I felt her hiccup every night at eleven.”
His face crumpled.
“I know.”
“I nearly bled to death delivering her.”
“I know.”
“Then this is wrong!”
I threw the paper across the room.
“She is my daughter!”
Marcus crossed the space between us.
I shoved him away.
He was too weak to resist.
He stumbled against the chair.
The sight of it horrified me.
I froze.
Marcus lowered himself slowly onto the bed.
“She is our daughter,” he said.
“Then explain it.”
His hands trembled.
I had never seen my husband’s hands tremble before.
“Do you remember the morning of the embryo transfer?”
Of course I remembered.
After almost four years of trying to conceive naturally, Marcus and I had turned to IVF.
Three procedures.
Two failed transfers.
One miscarriage.
Then, finally, Lily.
I remembered lying beneath a white sheet at the fertility center while Marcus squeezed my hand.
I remembered the tiny flash on the ultrasound screen.
Our embryo.
Our future.
Our miracle.
“What does that have to do with this?”
Marcus took a breath.
“The embryo they transferred wasn’t ours.”
I laughed because the alternative was screaming.
“That’s impossible.”
“I thought so too.”
“The clinic checked everything.”
“So we were told.”
“You’re saying they put someone else’s child inside me?”
“Yes.”
I stared at him.
“And ours?”
He looked away.
“Marcus.”
“I don’t know.”
The words nearly destroyed me.
I sank onto the floor.
He moved toward me.
I held up a hand.
“Don’t.”
So my husband sat on the edge of his hospital bed while I sat on the floor, and between us lay a sheet of paper saying that the little girl who called us Mommy and Daddy shared none of our DNA.
For eight years, I had believed the most extraordinary day of my life was the day Lily was born.
Now I learned the mistake that created our family might also have stolen another child from us.
The next seventy-two hours barely exist in my memory.
I went home because Lily needed dinner.
I cut strawberries.
Checked spelling homework.
Washed shampoo from her hair.
Read three chapters of The Secret Garden while she lay against my shoulder.
Every ordinary act felt sacred.
