Chapter 2
Emily had received Natalie’s first letter in May.
Ryan had been in Dallas negotiating the acquisition of a software company.
The envelope arrived by certified mail.
Emily signed for it.
It was addressed personally to Ryan.
She opened it anyway.
“I thought it might be a threat.”
Ryan stared at her across Rebecca’s conference table the next morning.
“You open all my mail when you think it might be threatening?”
“No.”
“Then why that one?”
Emily looked exhausted.
“Because the return address had the name Fairmont Reproductive Medicine.”
Ryan stopped.
He knew the clinic.
Seven years earlier, before he and Emily married, Ryan had participated in a compensated anonymous sperm-donor program there.
He had been twenty-nine.
Single.
Healthy.
Trying to help pay off graduate-school debt after starting his first company.
It lasted nine months.
Then he met Emily.
He withdrew from the program.
Fairmont confirmed in writing that unused material would no longer be distributed.
Two years later, he and Emily married.
Three years after that, Lily was born naturally after a long period of fertility difficulties and two miscarriages.
Ryan had not thought about Fairmont in years.
“What did Natalie’s letter say?”
Emily looked down.
“That she had used an anonymous donor.”
“And?”
“That she’d done one of those DNA ancestry tests.”
Ryan felt cold.
“She found me.”
“Not directly.”
Natalie’s daughter matched distantly with one of Ryan’s cousins who had uploaded DNA publicly.
Natalie worked backward from there.
She eventually located Ryan.
“She asked for money?”
“No.”
“Custody?”
“No.”
“What?”
Emily looked ashamed.
“A paternity test.”
Ryan sat back.
“And you decided I didn’t need to know?”
“I thought it was a scam.”
“Did you respond?”
“Yes.”
Rebecca looked up sharply.
“As yourself?”
Emily hesitated.
“Yes.”
She told Natalie that Ryan had withdrawn from the donor program before Mara could have been conceived.
That part was true.
According to Fairmont’s paperwork, Mara’s conception happened nearly eighteen months after Ryan’s withdrawal.
Emily told Natalie the claim was impossible.
Natalie replied with documents.
A donor identification number.
A treatment date.
A clinic billing statement.
Then a copy of the genetic match.
Emily hired a private investigator.
“Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“Because every answer made it worse.”
Ryan looked at her.
“That is not an answer.”
Emily’s voice cracked.
“We had just gotten Lily sleeping through the night. Your company was in the middle of that merger. We were finally…”
She stopped.
“Finally what?”
“Normal.”
Ryan stared.
“There was a child looking for me.”
“I didn’t know that yet.”
“You knew there might be.”
“Yes.”
The word hung between them.
Police had located Natalie overnight.
She was alive.
Two blocks from the house, a patrol officer had found her unconscious in a parked car on the same evening Mara entered the property.
Natalie had suffered a severe hypoglycemic episode.
Her phone was dead.
She had no identification on her when paramedics transported her because her purse remained inside the locked car.
She had been admitted as an unidentified patient.
Natalie regained consciousness the morning after Mara was discovered.
Her first question was about her daughter.
Her second:
“Did Ryan finally see her?”
That sentence destroyed any theory that Mara had been randomly abandoned.
May you like
Natalie had brought her deliberately.
Now Ryan needed to know why.
