Chapter 26
Hale slid the paper toward me.
It was a laboratory report.
Thirty-nine years old.
Genetic testing.
Primitive compared to modern tests, but clear enough.
Three names.
Charles Hawthorne.
Eleanor Hawthorne.
Infant A.
Infant B.
Declan stopped.
“What is this?”
Hale looked at him.
“Testing ordered after your birth.”
“For what?”
“Paternity.”
Silence.
Declan laughed.
“My father questioned whether we were his?”
Hale’s expression was strange.
“That’s what investigators initially assumed.”
My stomach tightened.
“What did it show?”
Hale slid another page forward.
Declan read it.
Then read it again.
His face emptied.
“No.”
I reached for the paper.
The report concluded that Charles Hawthorne was
excluded as the biological father of both infants.
I stared.
Declan whispered:
“What?”
Hale continued.
“Your mother had an affair.”
“With who?”
“We found correspondence.”
Declan’s voice trembled.
“Who was my biological father?”
Hale looked at me.
That was the moment I knew.
Before he spoke.
Before I saw the letter.
Before the entire impossible architecture of our lives rearranged itself one final time.
“No,” I whispered.
Hale placed an old photograph on the table.
My father.
Thomas Carter.
Standing beside Eleanor Hawthorne.
Young.
Smiling.
Close.
Too close.
Declan stared.
I could hear him breathing.
Hale said quietly:
“Thomas Carter was the biological father of Declan and Alexander.”
The room became silent.
My heart stopped.
Declan looked at me.
Then at the photograph.
Then back at me.
For one horrifying second, neither of us understood the implications.
Then we did.
“My father…” I whispered.
Hale immediately shook his head.
“Was not your biological father.”
I nearly collapsed.
“What?”
Another document appeared.
My birth certificate.
Then medical records.
“My God,” I whispered.
Hale explained.
Thomas Carter and his wife had struggled with infertility.
I had been adopted privately as a newborn.
My parents intended to tell me.
My mother died when I was six.
My father never did.
I was not biologically related to Thomas.
Which meant Declan and I were not siblings.
Relief hit so violently I nearly laughed and cried simultaneously.
But something even stranger remained.
Declan stared at Hale.
“Charles knew?”
“Yes.”
“About Thomas?”
“Eventually.”
That was why Charles hated him.
That was why he paid him.
Not only because Thomas discovered environmental crimes.
Thomas Carter had also fathered Eleanor Hawthorne’s twins.
Declan and Alexander.
Charles had spent decades protecting an empire that
his biological heirs did not actually belong to.
All his obsession with blood.