Not Biological
855 Words
Chapter Nineteen
Nathan had not been able to focus on a single thing all day.
He had snapped at his everyone, He moved through three meetings without retaining anything that was said in any of them. His responses had been adequate, the correct words assembled in the correct order, but there was nothing behind them. He was operating entirely on the surface of the day while something underneath kept pulling at him and refusing to be named or set aside.
He knew what it was. He simply did not want to look at it directly.
He had picked up his phone to call the doctor four times and put it back down each time because he could not answer the basic question of what he actually wanted to hear when someone picked up. That was the thing he kept running into. He was a man who built every decision around a clearly defined desired outcome, who never entered a room without knowing exactly what he was working toward.
And yet every time he sat with the question of what he wanted the result to say, he found only silence where the answer should have been.
Just silence, and underneath it something that felt uncomfortably close to dread.
He was at his desk for the fifth time with his phone in his hand when it lit up on its own.
Mr. Reed. The results are ready.
He set the phone down. He picked it up again. He sent his assistant to collect the envelope from the hospital and then he sat very still with his hands flat on the desk, his eyes fixed on the door, the room completely quiet around him.
His assistant returned twenty minutes later and placed the envelope on the desk with the careful deliberateness of a man who did not want to be responsible for what was inside it.
"The results sir.”
"Open it."
The man opened the envelope, unfolded the single sheet of paper, read it once silently, and then looked up. His face gave almost nothing away but Nathan caught the slight pause before he spoke, the brief recalibration of someone choosing their words carefully.
"Sir, the result shows a zero percent probability. You are not the biological father."
The room went completely still
Nathan could hear his own breathing and his assistant's breathing and nothing else. The paper was still in the man's hands. Nathan did not reach for it.
"Leave it on the desk. You can go."
The door closed.
He sat without moving. Zero percent. It was the answer that resolved everything cleanly. It meant the boy was not his responsibility, that the question that had been lodged in the back of his throat for days could now be removed.
He should have felt relief.
He did not feel relief.
He felt something press against the inside of his chest that had no proper name, a tightening that made no logical sense given that the result had just handed him exactly the exit he needed. He pushed back from the desk and walked to the window and stood there with his hands behind his back looking down at the street twenty floors below while the afternoon light shifted slowly against the glass and the city moved through its ordinary business far beneath him.
He would tell Alex who had been thinking Sarah was his mother now and they can both rest,and he would announce it publicly.
He shook his head. The test had said what it said. That was the end of it.
What Nathan did not know, standing at that window, was that Adin had been several steps ahead of him from the very beginning.
Three days before the test, Adin had taken money and ordered two matching wigs. One for himself, one for his sister. That evening he had sat with her and explained plainly what he believed was coming, Adin had also warned aria not to tell their mum, She had listened all the way through without interrupting and then asked one question. He had answered it.
They wore the wigs on the morning Adin knew Nathan or his men would come. He had been watching the pattern for weeks, noting the intervals, tracking the way events triggered responses, measuring the window between when something happened and when Nathan acted on it. He had done the calculation carefully and he had been correct. Nathan arrived exactly when expected, moving with the quiet confidence of a man who believed he was operating without anyone's knowledge, and he had taken the sample with the precision of someone entirely certain he was in control of the situation.
The sample was from a wig.
The result on Nathan's desk was perfectly accurate. It was simply not answering the question he thought he had asked.
Nathan picked up the paper, read it one final time, folded it, and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket. Tomorrow he would go public and address the issue so they all would move on.
“Prepare the press tomorrow 2pm I would go live.” he Instructed his assistant.
- Writer
