Nine Months Ago
Chapter 2: Nine Months Ago
They'd met at a bookstore.
Not the kind of meeting that makes a good story — no dramatic collision, no spilled coffee, no eyes-across-the-room. Nathan was looking for a birthday gift for his mother. Sophie Reeves was shelving returns in the literary fiction section because she worked there three days a week while finishing her master's in education.
He asked her for a recommendation. She asked him what his mother was like. He said, "Difficult," and Sophie laughed — the kind of laugh that was more surprise than amusement, the kind that happens when someone says something unexpectedly honest — and Nathan thought: I want to hear that sound again.
He came back the next day. And the next. On the fourth day, Sophie said, "You've bought six books this week. Either you read very fast or you need a different excuse to talk to me."
"I need a different excuse," he said.
They dated for a year. It was — good. Not cinematic, not dramatic, the kind of good that accumulates in small moments. She made him laugh. He made her feel safe. She introduced him to her mother Margaret, who was warm and direct and said, over dinner at her house in Milford, "He seems decent. Don't let him prove me wrong."
Nathan's mother, Catherine, was a different reception.
Catherine Cole was sixty-two, widowed, the sole inheritor of a commercial real estate portfolio that her husband had built before his death in 2018. She lived in a Tudor in Greenwich, employed a housekeeper and a driver, and had opinions about everything that she expressed with the certainty of a woman who had never been told she was wrong by anyone who mattered.
She met Sophie at a lunch Catherine had arranged at a restaurant where the appetizers cost more than Sophie's hourly wage. Catherine was polite. Catherine was charming. Catherine asked Sophie about her master's program and her family and her plans with the specific, exhaustive interest of a woman conducting a background check verbally.
After Sophie left, Catherine said to Nathan: "She's a sweet girl."
"I love her," Nathan said.
"I'm sure you do." Catherine took a sip of wine. "Where did you say her father was?"
"He died when she was twelve."
"And her mother works in—"
"She manages a dental office."
"Mm." The sound that Catherine made when she was filing information under a heading Nathan wouldn't like.
"Mom."
"I didn't say anything. She's sweet. She's just — she's not what I pictured for you."
"What did you picture?"
Catherine smiled. The smile that meant the conversation was over but the thinking had just begun.
Nathan proposed to Sophie on a Saturday in March, in her apartment, with a ring he'd bought himself — not from the family jeweler Catherine had suggested, but from a small shop in New Haven that Sophie had once pointed out in passing. She said yes. She cried. Margaret cried. Catherine, when told, said, "How lovely. We should discuss the venue."
They didn't discuss the venue. They didn't discuss anything, because four months after the engagement, Nathan received a manila envelope at his office.
No return address. Inside: a DNA test from a laboratory called Genova Diagnostics, with Nathan's name and Sophie's name and a result that read, in clinical, emotionless language, that the probability of paternity was 0.00%.
Not the father.
Nathan sat at his desk and read the result four times. Then he drove to Sophie's apartment and put the paper on the kitchen counter and said, "Explain this."
Sophie looked at the document. Her face went white.
"I've never taken a DNA test," she said. "Nathan, I've never — I don't know what this is."
"It's a paternity test. And it says the baby isn't mine."
"That's not possible. There hasn't been anyone else. You know that."
"This says otherwise."
"I don't care what it says. I'm telling you the truth."
He wanted to believe her. Standing in that kitchen, looking at her face — the fear in it, the confusion, the desperate sincerity — he wanted to believe her the way he'd wanted to believe everything she'd ever told him. But the document was there. The numbers were there. The clinical, irrefutable language of science was there, and Nathan was a man who'd been raised to trust evidence over emotion.
Catherine had raised him that way. Trust what you can verify. Trust what's on paper. Don't be a fool.
"I need some time," he said.
"Nathan—"
"I need to think."
He left. He went to his mother's house. He showed Catherine the test. She read it with the particular focus of a woman who processes information quickly and arrives at conclusions faster.
"I'm sorry, sweetheart," Catherine said. "I know this isn't what you wanted to hear."
"Someone sent this to me. I didn't order it."
"Maybe someone who cared about you wanted you to know the truth."
"Who would do that?"
Catherine set the document down. "Does it matter? The result is the result."
Nathan stared at his mother. He was thirty-five years old. He'd been making his own decisions for a decade. But standing in Catherine's Tudor in Greenwich, holding a test that said his life was a lie, he felt like he was twelve again — uncertain, looking for a direction, deferring to the person who had always been the most certain voice in the room.
"What do I do?" he asked.
"You do what's right for you," Catherine said. "And you stop letting sentiment override evidence."
He called off the engagement the next day. He moved out within the week. Sophie called him — once, twice, ten times, twenty. He didn't answer. She came to his office. He had the receptionist turn her away. She wrote him letters — actual handwritten letters, the kind nobody writes anymore — and he read them and felt the pull of them and put them in a drawer and didn't respond.
Because the test said 0.00%. And his mother said trust the evidence. And Nathan, who had spent his whole life trusting his mother because she was the most certain person he knew, trusted her one more time.
Nine months passed. Sophie had her baby. Margaret took care of her daughter. And Nathan — Nathan told himself a story about a woman who'd betrayed him, and he lived inside that story the way you live inside a house with no windows, and he didn't look outside because looking outside meant admitting the house was a cage.
Then, this morning, a phone call.
Margaret Reeves. She never called. She had his number — she'd always had it — but she'd respected Sophie's wish to stop trying. This morning, she called.
"She's in labor," Margaret said. "St. Joseph's. Room 4. I'm calling because if you have any decency left — any at all — you'll be here."
He drove to the hospital at ninety miles an hour.
May you like
He walked through the maternity ward doors and found Margaret standing guard outside the delivery room, and she slapped him, and the rest — the document, the paternity match, the 99.98% — was still echoing off the pale walls.
One of the tests was wrong. And Nathan, standing in the fluorescent light with a handprint on his cheek and his child being born fifteen feet away, was beginning to understand which one.
