Chapter 2 - The Test Margaret Destroyed
Emily left the Parker house that night.
She packed only what Sophie needed.
Rachel followed her into the driveway.
“Emily, wait.”
Emily strapped Sophie into the car seat.
“What?”
“You can stay with me.”
Emily laughed once.
There was no humor in it.
“You stood ten feet away while Mom had my daughter chained to a staircase.”
“I didn’t know about the chain.”
“But you knew how she treated her.”
Rachel looked away.
That answered enough.
Emily closed the rear door.
Rachel grabbed her arm.
“What did the DNA test say?”
Emily studied her sister.
“I thought Mom destroyed it because she didn’t want to know.”
“And now?”
“Now I think she already knew.”
Rachel swallowed.
“Emily…”
“What?”
“Who did you test Sophie against?”
Emily hesitated.
The answer went back to Daniel Parker.
Her late husband.
Daniel had died in a highway accident eleven months before Sophie came into Emily’s care.
Three months after his funeral, Emily received a call from a woman named Lauren Mills.
Lauren claimed Daniel had fathered a baby shortly before he died.
Emily had almost hung up.
Then Lauren sent photographs.
Daniel holding a newborn.
Daniel’s handwriting on the back of one picture.
Protect her if anything happens to me.
Lauren disappeared two weeks later.
Not literally.
She simply stopped answering.
Emily eventually learned Lauren had died from complications related to an untreated heart condition.
Sophie had no legal father listed on her birth certificate.
No stable relatives.
Emily had taken temporary guardianship.
Then permanent guardianship.
She never told Margaret the full story.
Margaret already hated Daniel.
And she hated Sophie almost immediately.
“She’s Daniel’s daughter,” Emily said.
Rachel stared at her.
“You tested her against Daniel?”
“The hospital still had a stored tissue sample from his accident.”
“And?”
Emily looked toward the house.
“The report confirmed it.”
Rachel breathed out.
“Then Mom was right about one thing. Sophie isn’t biologically related to us.”
Emily shook her head.
“That’s what I thought.”
Rachel frowned.
Emily reached into her purse and pulled out her phone.
“The lab called me this morning.”
She opened an email.
“The technician said there was something unusual in the sample.”
“What?”
“The comparison didn’t only establish Daniel as Sophie’s biological father.”
Rachel stared.
“What else did it establish?”
Emily enlarged the laboratory note.
Because Daniel and Emily had once undergone genetic carrier screening while trying to conceive, the laboratory already had Emily’s DNA profile on file.
The technician had noticed something statistically impossible to ignore.
Sophie shared significant genetic markers with Emily too.
Rachel read the note twice.
“That can’t be right.”
“I know.”
“You and Daniel never had a baby.”
Emily’s face tightened.
They had tried.
For years.
There had been fertility treatment.
An embryo transfer.
A pregnancy.
Then at sixteen weeks, Emily had been told she lost the baby.
She had spent years grieving a daughter she never got to hold.
Rachel suddenly looked sick.
“Emily…”
Emily stared at her.
“What?”
Rachel’s eyes filled with tears.
“Mom went to the fertility clinic with you that day.”
Emily stopped breathing.
The day she supposedly lost her pregnancy, Margaret had driven her home.
Margaret had handled paperwork.
Margaret had spoken privately with the doctor.
Emily had been heavily sedated after the procedure.
She remembered almost nothing.
Rachel whispered:
“You need to request your old medical records.”
Emily’s hands went cold.
“Why?”
Rachel looked toward their mother’s house.
“Because I heard Mom arguing with Dad that night.”
Their father had been dead for four years.
Emily had never known there had been an argument.
“What did they say?”
Rachel closed her eyes.
“Dad kept saying, ‘You had no right to make that decision for her.’”
Emily felt the world tilt.
“What decision?”
Rachel shook her head.
“I never knew.”
Emily looked through the car window at Sophie.
The little girl was finally asleep.
For eight months, Emily had believed Sophie was Daniel’s secret daughter.
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Now there was a possibility far more impossible.
Sophie might be hers too.
