The Blood
Chapter 3: The Blood
Dr. Vasquez pulled Nathan into a consultation room across the hall. Margaret followed — not because she was invited, but because Margaret Reeves was not a woman who waited in hallways when her daughter was on the other side of a wall.
Vasquez set the folder on the table and opened it fully.
"The paternity confirmation isn't why I pulled this file," she said. "There's a complication."
Nathan's face changed. The guilty, defensive expression of the hallway gave way to something simpler — fear. The basic, uncomplicated fear of a person hearing the word complication in a hospital.
"Sophie is stable. The baby—" Vasquez paused. The particular pause of a doctor choosing words. "The baby is presenting with indicators consistent with neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia. NAIT. It's a blood condition — the mother's immune system produces antibodies that attack the baby's platelets."
"Is it serious?"
"It can be. In most cases it's manageable, but we need to move quickly. And to do that, I need the father's complete medical history. Blood type, Rh factor, platelet antigen profile." She looked at Nathan. "You told the intake nurse you weren't the father. That means we've been operating without half the picture."
"I'm O-negative," Nathan said immediately. "Rh-negative."
Vasquez made a note. "That's consistent with what we're seeing. The Rh incompatibility could be the trigger." She looked up. "I need more than blood type. I need your full antigen panel. We can run it here in an hour."
"Do it."
"I need your consent for a blood draw."
"You have it. Whatever you need."
Vasquez stood. She paused at the door. "Mr. Cole. The paternity test in this file — the one from this hospital — is definitive. Whatever other test you received, it was wrong. You are this baby's father, and right now, your medical information may be the difference between your child having a manageable condition and a dangerous one."
She left. Nathan sat in the consultation room and stared at the table.
Margaret sat across from him.
"You drove here at ninety miles an hour," she said. "Why?"
"Because you called."
"I've been calling for nine months. Sophie called for nine months. Why today?"
Nathan looked at his hands. The hands that had held the fake DNA report, held Sophie's letters, held his phone while her calls rang out.
"Because I never believed it," he said quietly. "Not really. Not in the part of me that — the test said one thing. Everything else said another. And I chose the test because choosing the test was easier than choosing her."
"Easier how?"
"Because if the test was right, then I was a victim. Someone had lied to me, betrayed me, and I could walk away clean. But if the test was wrong—"
"Then you abandoned a pregnant woman for nothing."
"Yes."
Margaret leaned back. She looked at this man — this man she'd liked, once, at her dinner table, before he'd proven her wrong — and she made a decision.
"Three months ago," she said, "I hired a private investigator."
Nathan looked up.
"Sophie wouldn't let me. She said it was over, that you'd made your choice, that she didn't want to chase a man who didn't want her. But I'm her mother, and mothers don't accept things. Not when something doesn't add up."
"What didn't add up?"
"The test. You said someone sent it to you. Anonymously. No return address." Margaret's eyes were steady. "In my experience, anonymous gifts are never gifts. They're weapons. Somebody wanted you to see that test. Somebody put it in your hands at exactly the right moment to do the most damage."
"Who?"
"That's what the investigator found out." Margaret reached into her coat and pulled out a folder. Not a hospital folder — a PI's report, bound, tabbed, thorough. "The DNA test you received was from a laboratory called Genova Diagnostics in New Jersey."
"I know."
"Genova Diagnostics lost its accreditation eighteen months ago. It's under investigation by the state licensing board for falsified results in four separate cases."
Nathan went still.
"The test was fake, Nathan. Not wrong — fake. Someone paid a disgraced lab to produce a document with your name on it that said exactly what they wanted it to say."
"Who paid for it?"
Margaret opened the folder to a tabbed page. A bank record. A wire transfer. Fifteen thousand dollars, from an account registered to the Cole Family Trust, to Genova Diagnostics, dated six days before Nathan received the envelope.
Nathan stared at the page. He stared at the account name. He stared at it the way you stare at the moment your life divides into before and after.
May you like
"My mother," he said.
"Your mother."
