Probability: 0%.
I stared at the page until my eyes hurt.
“No.”
Nobody spoke.
“No.”
I shook my head.
“I was there.”
Mara touched my arm.
I pulled away.
“You knew about this?”
“No.”
“Natalie?”
“She may have.”
I drove home without speaking.
Natalie was sitting beside Owen on the living-room floor.
They were building a wooden train track.
I placed the report on the table.
Natalie saw it.
Her expression told me everything.
“You knew.”
“Grant…”
“You knew.”
Owen looked up.
“Daddy?”
I forced my voice to remain normal.
“Go upstairs for a minute, buddy.”
“Did I do something?”
That nearly broke me.
“No.”
I knelt.
“You didn't do anything.”
He walked upstairs.
I waited until his door closed.
“How long?”
Natalie began crying.
“My father gave me a copy when Owen was three months old.”
I couldn't speak for several seconds.
“You let me raise a child you believed wasn't mine without telling me?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“I never believed the test.”
“You hid it.”
“Yes.”
“That's called believing it enough to be afraid of it.”
She wiped her face.
“My father told me that if I ever questioned him, he would send it to you.”
“So you protected the secret.”
“I protected our family.”
“You don't get to decide what truth I'm allowed to survive.”
She flinched.
I hated that part of me still noticed.
“Who is Owen's biological father?”
“I don't know.”
“Was there another man?”
“No!”
She said it immediately.
“No. Grant, never.”
“Then explain the test.”
“I can't.”
Mara entered behind me.
“Yes, you can.”
Natalie looked at her.
Mara placed another folder on the table.
“The test is fake.”
I stared at her.
“What?”
“Thomas contacted the laboratory listed on the document.”
“And?”
“They never performed it.”
I looked at Natalie.
She sat down.
Mara continued.
“The laboratory number belongs to a different case.”
“Then why manufacture this?”
“To make Natalie afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Losing you.”
It worked.
For five years, Malcolm had possessed a weapon against his own daughter.
A lie she was too frightened to test.
But that still didn't answer why Owen's hospital record had been changed.
Thomas found that answer the next morning.
He located a retired neonatal nurse named Eleanor Price.
She agreed to meet us at a diner.
The moment she saw Owen's newborn photograph, she began crying.
“I wondered about that child for years.”
My heart started pounding.
“What happened?”
She stirred her coffee even though she hadn't taken a sip.
“Your son wasn't switched.”
Relief hit me so hard my eyes closed.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“How?”