Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Twenty: The Second Discrepancy

Delaney

She noticed something was wrong before Roman said a word, the specific quality of his silence at breakfast becoming familiar enough over the past nine months that she'd learned to read it like weather.

"You've been somewhere else in your head for three days," she said, watching him push eggs around his plate without eating them. "What's going on."

He told her then, finally, the birthdate discrepancy, Nadia's oddly formal response, the unease he'd been carrying alone since his grandmother's kitchen table. Delaney listened, her own stomach tightening with each detail, the specific dread of watching a small, dismissible thing accumulate weight the longer it sat unexamined.

"Why didn't you tell me right away?"

"I didn't want to hand you a fear I couldn't confirm. You just spent weeks learning to trust the family we're building. I didn't want to undo that over what might turn out to be nothing."

"Roman, we promised each other no more managing things alone. That was the whole lesson of the hospital room, remember? I need the real fear, not the version you've already pre-processed for my benefit." She reached across the table, steadying, frustrated but not unkind. "What do you actually think is going on?"

"I don't know. I keep trying not to think the worst, because the worst is genuinely awful to consider. But something about the timeline doesn't sit right, and Nadia's never been evasive with me before, not about pickup times, not about doctor's appointments, nothing. The second I asked a direct question about the birthdate, she went quiet and formal in a way that felt like a door closing."

Delaney sat with that, turning it over with the careful, methodical instinct that had made her good at crisis management for a decade. "Do you have access to any other paperwork? Insurance forms, daycare enrollment, anything with an official date on it that isn't just Nadia's word?"

"I hadn't thought to look."

"I have a friend in the league's benefits office who processes dependent enrollment forms. If Mia's on your insurance yet, there'd be a birth certificate on file, an actual legal document, not just a conversation." She was already reaching for her phone. "I'm not trying to accuse Nadia of anything before we have real information, Roman. But I am done letting either of us sit alone with an unconfirmed fear when there's a way to just check the facts."

Roman

The insurance paperwork, when Delaney's contact pulled it two days later, listed a birthdate eight months more recent than the one Nadia had originally given him at the studio, a discrepancy too large to be a clerical error, too specific to be an accident.

"Eight months," Roman said, staring at the document Delaney had printed out, feeling something cold and furious settle low in his chest. "That's not a typo. That's a lie, and I don't understand what it's supposed to accomplish, unless the timeline of when Mia was conceived matters more than I initially understood."

"It matters," Delaney said, quiet, working through the implications with the same careful precision she brought to every crisis. "If Mia's birthdate is eight months later than what Nadia originally told you, that changes the window of conception considerably. It might not put it in the timeframe Nadia originally described, before your relationship ended."

"Meaning what."

"Meaning I think we need a second paternity test," Delaney said, gently, watching something in Roman's face crack open at the suggestion. "Not because I don't trust the first result. But because if the birthdate was misrepresented once, I don't think we can assume anything else in this story is solid until we've confirmed it independently, through a source that isn't just Nadia's word."

Roman sat with that for a long, silent moment, the specific horror of realizing that the daughter he'd spent weeks falling in love with, dandelions and bedtime stories and a night light declared the best one, might not, in fact, be his at all.

"If she's not mine," he said, finally, voice rough, "what happens to the last couple of weeks? What happens to the bond we've built, the custody schedule, the trust I extended a woman I hadn't spoken to in two years because she showed up with a positive test and a convincing story?"

"I don't know," Delaney admitted. "I don't think there's a clean answer to that question, whatever the second test says. But I know we can't build a wedding, a family, an entire life together on a foundation we haven't actually verified is solid. We deserve the truth, Roman, whatever it costs us to get there."

"And Mia? Whatever the test says, I don't think I can just stop loving her, even if it turns out she's not biologically mine."

"I know," Delaney said, softer now, reaching for his hand. "That's not a question either of us has to answer today. Today we just get the second test. We find out what's actually true. Everything else, we figure out together, the way we've figured out every other complicated thing this year."

He ordered the second test that afternoon, an independent lab this time, no connection to whatever paperwork Nadia had originally provided, and the seven days until the results arrived stretched out longer and heavier than any wait either of them had endured all year, longer than the six weeks of his recovery, longer than the wait for Delaney's own readiness after the Portland hit.

He kept seeing Mia's daycare schedule every Tuesday and Thursday exactly as arranged, unwilling to let his own uncertainty cost her a single ordinary, stable day, reading her the same bedtime story in the same soft voice, unsure, every single night, whether he was reading it to his own daughter or to a little girl he'd have to somehow, impossibly, learn to let go of.

"Flower," Mia told him, on the fourth night of waiting, holding up a slightly wilted dandelion with the same solemn ceremony as the very first one, and Roman took it with careful hands, throat tight, loving her exactly as much as he had the day before, regardless of what the second test might ultimately reveal.

"Thank you," he told her, voice rough. "This is a very good flower."

Whatever the results said, he thought, tucking her in that night, he already knew one thing with absolute certainty that no lab report could unmake.

He loved her. However this had started, whatever the truth turned out to be, that part, at least, was real.