Chapter 8 — Chain of Custody
1629 Words
POV: Adrian Blackwood
Present Day — Meridian Diagnostics, Thursday
The waiting room smelled like hand sanitizer and old carpet, which felt like an insult to the size of the moment happening inside it. I'd sat in boardrooms worth more than this entire strip mall. None of them had ever made my hands sweat the way that plastic chair did.
Seraphina's attorney arrived first, a sharp, unreadable woman named Patrice who shook my hand once and then treated me like furniture for the rest of the appointment. I didn't blame her for it. I imagined I'd earned that treatment fairly. She had the particular energy of a woman who had read my entire legal history before breakfast and found none of it impressive.
Seraphina came next, with the twins, and I understood within about four seconds that Alex had already decided this entire building was beneath him.
"This is a Meridian Diagnostics franchise location," he informed nobody in particular, studying the reception desk like it had personally disappointed him. "Their parent lab handles genetic testing for six hospital systems. Their front-end security is not proportional to that responsibility."
"Alex." Seraphina didn't even look up from the intake form. "Not today."
"I'm simply making an observation."
"Make it quietly."
He made it quietly, which meant he leaned over and made the exact same observation to Aurora in a stage whisper clearly designed to reach me anyway. I filed it away with the specific unease of a man who had learned, the hard way, exactly what that particular tone of voice from that particular child tended to precede.
Seraphina sat two chairs down from me, close enough that I could smell her perfume and far enough that the distance felt deliberate. Neither of us spoke for a while.
"You didn't have to come," she said eventually, not looking at me.
"I wanted to."
"That's not the same thing."
"I know." I turned the folder Patrice had handed me over in my hands, not reading it. "I'm not trying to make this harder than it already is."
"You're doing an admirable job anyway."
I almost smiled. It would have been the wrong thing to do, so I didn't.
A technician called us back one at a time. I went first — a swab, thirty seconds, less ceremony than I'd braced myself for. I'd expected the moment to feel enormous. Instead it felt almost insulting in its smallness, the idea that something this large in my life could be settled with a cotton swab and a barcode sticker. I signed three forms, initialed a chain-of-custody log, and watched a stranger seal my own DNA into a plastic bag like it was evidence from a crime scene. In a sense, I supposed, it was.
Alex went next. I watched through the open door as the technician, a young guy with a tired face and a lanyard full of pins, tried to make conversation.
"You doing okay, buddy?"
"I'm fine. What operating system does your intake terminal run?"
The technician blinked. "I — don't actually know."
"You should find out. It's relevant to your career."
"He's very thorough," the technician said, glancing toward the doorway for backup that wasn't coming.
"I prefer 'diligent,'" Alex said. "Do you back up your database locally or to a cloud server?"
"Alexander." Seraphina's voice again, patient in the specific way of someone who had used it several thousand times already this week.
"I'm being helpful."
"You're being ominous."
"There's overlap."
The technician laughed, a little nervously, and finished the swab without asking anything further. I noticed Alex watching him do it — not the swab itself, but the screen the technician typed the results into afterward, with the specific, patient attention of someone committing something to memory.
I laughed before I could stop myself — a short, involuntary sound that surprised both of us. Seraphina glanced at me, something unreadable crossing her face, and for one strange second we were just two exhausted parents sharing a joke about a kid who was, by any reasonable measure, too much. It didn't last. It wasn't supposed to. She looked away first, back toward the hallway where Alex had disappeared, and whatever had briefly opened between us closed again just as fast.
"He gets that from you," I said, before I could stop myself. "The thoroughness."
"He gets the thoroughness from me." A pause, just a beat too long. "The arrogance, I'll let you guess."
"I have a guess."
It was the closest thing to an easy exchange we'd had since the gala, and neither of us seemed to know what to do with it. I found myself wanting to say something else, something that might stretch the moment out a little longer, and caught myself before I could. Whatever this was, it wasn't safe to lean into. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Aurora went last, chattering the entire time about a school project on volcanoes, utterly unbothered by any of it, which I was starting to understand was its own kind of coping mechanism in that family. She stopped just before the technician swabbed her cheek to ask, with total sincerity, whether volcano rock counted as "a rock that used to be a liquid person," which nobody in the room could fully answer. Nobody had explained to her, apparently, exactly what today was for. I didn't know if that was mercy or strategy. With Seraphina, I was learning, it was often difficult to tell the difference.
"Results in five to seven business days," Patrice told us both, in the flat voice of someone who had said this sentence in a hundred other rooms. "Sealed chain of custody, both parties get simultaneous notification. No exceptions, no early access. The lab is independent and accredited — neither of you has any influence over the process from here."
"Understood," I said.
"Good. Because I've seen these things get contested before, and it never goes well for whichever side tries to interfere with the process." She said it lightly, like a formality, and I wondered afterward if she'd somehow already known something neither Seraphina nor I did yet.
Seraphina said nothing at all. She was watching Alex, who had drifted toward the reception desk again under the thin pretense of examining a poster about flu shots, and I saw the exact moment she clocked what I'd already half-suspected — that her son was not looking at the poster. He was looking at the terminal behind the desk, and the particular stillness in his face was the stillness of a boy doing math.
"Alex." Just his name this time, low, urgent in a way the rest of the visit hadn't been.
"I'm not doing anything," he said, which from a five-year-old is rarely reassuring and from that particular five-year-old was actively alarming.
"We're leaving. Now."
"I haven't finished my observation."
"You've finished it," Seraphina said, already steering him by the shoulder toward the door with a firmness that suggested this was not a negotiation. "Say goodbye to the nice lady at the desk."
"Goodbye," Alex said to the receptionist, with the exact tone of a man concluding a business meeting rather than a five-year-old leaving a doctor's office. The receptionist looked faintly unsettled and said nothing at all.
We filed out into the parking lot in the kind of silence that has too many things underneath it to risk saying any of them out loud. Alex walked ahead with the particular satisfied gait of a boy who had gotten away with something, which I chose, for my own sanity, not to examine too closely yet. Aurora skipped beside him, still narrating volcanoes to whoever would listen.
I caught Seraphina's eye once, over the roof of her car, and for a moment I thought she might actually say something real to me — an apology, a truce, anything. Instead, she just looked tired, and young in a way five years of running an empire hadn't quite managed to erase, and got into the car without a word.
I drove home alone, replaying the whole appointment, and it wasn't until I was halfway through a whiskey I didn't remember pouring that the unease actually landed.
Alex hadn't been looking at a flu shot poster. He'd been looking at a terminal running software he'd already diagnosed as insufficient, in a lab that was about to hold the single most important piece of information in my entire life. I thought about Marcus's voice on the phone, walking me through chain-of-custody requirements like they were sacred. I thought about how much of that process depended on a computer system nobody in that building seemed to be watching very closely.
I told myself I was being paranoid. A father's anxiety, dressed up as suspicion, because the alternative — that a five-year-old currently obsessed with server closets and firewalls had just spent ninety seconds alone with the system that would determine his own paternity case — was too absurd to take seriously.
I poured a second whiskey and didn't drink it. Some instinct older than the one my father had trained into me was telling me to call Patrice in the morning and ask her to double-check the lab's security. I ignored it. I was tired of being the man who assumed the worst of everyone around him. For once, I wanted to be wrong about that instead of right.
My phone buzzed once, close to midnight. A single text from an unknown number, no name attached.
You should really update your firewall too. Just saying. — a friend :)
I stared at it for a long time before I set the phone face-down on the counter and told myself, again, that I was being paranoid.
I believed that for almost exactly four days.
- Writer
