Chapter 4
The paternity test came back four days later.
Ryan was Mara’s biological father.
No ambiguity.
No affair.
No hidden relationship.
No memory he had somehow buried.
His donated genetic material had been used to conceive a child almost eighteen months after Fairmont told him it would no longer be distributed.
Ryan read the report alone first.
Then with Emily.
She cried.
He did not.
Not because he felt less.
Because his emotions had become too complicated to fit into one reaction.
“There’s no possibility you knew?” Emily asked.
Ryan looked at her.
“You’re asking me that?”
She immediately regretted it.
“I’m sorry.”
He closed the report.
“Did Natalie send you all of this?”
“Not all.”
“What did she send?”
Emily brought out a folder she had kept inside her home office.
Another betrayal.
Smaller than the first.
Still real.
Natalie’s correspondence.
The genetic match.
A copy of the donor code.
Several emails.
One Fairmont letter.
Ryan read it.
The clinic had responded to Natalie’s inquiry three months earlier.
They claimed archived records were incomplete.
They could neither confirm nor deny the identity of the donor.
Then one strange line:
Donor inventory in this period may have been subject to administrative continuity procedures.
Rebecca frowned when she read it.
“That sounds like somebody paid by the syllable to avoid a sentence.”
Emily had noticed something else.
The letter was signed by Dr. Leonard Hale, Fairmont’s former medical director.
Ryan remembered the name.
Hale ran the clinic when Ryan joined the donor program.
“He was there when I withdrew.”
Rebecca immediately requested the withdrawal file.
Fairmont produced it.
Ryan’s withdrawal form was valid.
Signed.
Dated.
Accepted.
Then another document appeared two days later:
Distribution hold pending inventory reconciliation.
That sounded like the samples should have been frozen from use.
But eighteen months later one had been used for Natalie.
“How?” Ryan asked.
Fairmont’s attorney claimed the clinic had migrated systems and could not explain every historical code.
Rebecca did not like that.
Neither did Natalie’s lawyer.
They requested the original cryogenic inventory logs.
Fairmont resisted.
That became the first institutional clue.
A clinic with nothing to hide should still protect patient privacy.
But it should be able to explain why withdrawn donor material was used.
May you like
Fairmont could not.
Or would not.
