Chapter 5 - The Bloodline Report
We spent the rest of Christmas Eve in a private hospital suite guarded by Everett’s security team.
My goal was to read the genetic report without letting the new hospital take Noah from my sight.
The report compared my DNA to an unidentified founder sample.
Match probability: 49.8%.
Parent-child relationship likely.
The code beside the founder sample was BM-A1.
Everett searched the company archive.
Acquisition One was not a business.
It was a person.
Benjamin Mercer.
Founder of Brooks Meridian.
Everett’s grandfather.
The man whose portrait hung in every corporate lobby.
The report suggested Benjamin Mercer was my biological father.
That made me Everett’s aunt by blood.
The room went silent.
Everett stepped back from the bed.
“No.”
I felt the same horror.
We had been married four years.
Noah lay between us.
But the report did not prove the conclusion.
Only a likely relationship.
Everett called an independent geneticist.
Dr. Aaron Wells reviewed the data and immediately found a flaw.
The founder sample was not labeled with source tissue.
No chain of custody.
No collection date.
“It could belong to anyone,” he said.
Eleanor had designed the report to imply incest without proving it.
A psychological weapon.
Just like the forged death certificate.
But Aaron noticed another marker.
The sample was female.
Benjamin Mercer could not be the source.
The label BM-A1 had been deliberately misassigned.
The DNA actually matched me to a woman.
A mother or daughter.
Everett searched sealed family files.
Benjamin Mercer had one hidden daughter.
Eleanor.
My stomach turned again.
If the sample belonged to Eleanor, she might be my biological mother.
Everett looked at me.
“That would still make us—”
“No,” Aaron interrupted. “Not necessarily.”
He compared Everett’s archived health profile.
Everett did not genetically match Eleanor.
His mother was not his biological mother.
The entire family tree shifted again.
Eleanor may have given birth to me.
But she had not given birth to Everett.
Then Aaron tested Noah using the hospital sample already taken at birth.
Noah matched both of us as biological parents.
He was Everett’s son.
He was mine.
And there was no close-sibling relationship between Everett and me.
The immediate fear collapsed.
But the mystery deepened.
Why would Eleanor hide that she was my mother while raising Everett as her son?
The answer appeared in a trust amendment.
Benjamin Mercer’s estate transferred controlling ownership to “the first verified biological daughter of Eleanor Brooks who produces a male heir within the Brooks executive line.”
That was me.
Noah activated the inheritance.
Not Everett.
Me.
Eleanor did not want Noah because he was Everett’s child.
She wanted him because my blood gave him control of the company.
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I thought I was an outsider to the Brooks family—but the genetic report made me the only person who could legally break Eleanor’s hold over it.
The notarized witness on the trust amendment was my adoptive father, the man who had sworn he knew nothing about my birth.
