Chapter 2 - The Wrong Son
The ambulance took all three of us to St. Matthew's.
Lily had a bruised shoulder, Michael had torn ligaments in one wrist, and I couldn't stop shaking long enough to sign my own name.
The pediatrician finally looked at us and said, "Your daughter is incredibly lucky."
Lucky.
I hated the word.
Luck was what people called disaster when the body count happened to be zero.
Michael sat beside Lily's crib in the emergency room, his injured wrist wrapped, his good hand around her ankle.
"You knew about the test?" he asked.
"I knew there were questions."
"That's not what I asked."
I swallowed. "Your mother sent me a paternity report when I was six months pregnant. It said you weren't Lily's father."
His head snapped toward me.
"She what?"
"I didn't believe it. We had already done the prenatal test together. So I called the lab printed on the report. The case number didn't exist."
Michael's jaw tightened.
I pulled the envelope from my bag. "Then Margaret Shaw contacted me."
"She said Diane had been asking how to destroy archived genetic records from an old estate case. Margaret got suspicious. She gave me copies of the original files and told me to order an independent comparison."
Michael stared at the page again.
The result was brutally simple: Lily was his biological daughter. But Michael's paternal markers matched archived samples belonging not to Robert Bennett, the man who raised him, but to Robert's older brother Andrew.
Michael laughed once, without humor.
"My mother spent my whole life telling me I had Robert's eyes."
A detective entered before I could answer.
"Mr. Bennett, Mrs. Bennett, Diane has been arrested for attempted murder."
Michael looked at the crib. "Good."
The detective put a clear evidence bag on the counter.
Inside was Diane's phone.
"We found a text she sent forty minutes before the gala."
He turned the screen toward us.
IF THE BABY IS STILL HERE WHEN THE AUDIT STARTS, WE'RE FINISHED.
The message had gone to Victor Hale, Bennett Group's chief financial officer and Diane's closest friend for nearly thirty years.
May you like
Under it was Victor's reply.
THEN DO WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE TEN MONTHS AGO.
