Chapter 5 - The Gathering in the Dark
The night before the official results were scheduled to be delivered at Apex Genetics, my father called me to his rental apartment.
When I arrived, setting a sleeping Emma down on his guest bed, I found the dining table covered in yellowed documents, old black-and-white photographs, and a certified medical file bound in a faded blue folder.
"Sit down, Claire," Dad said, pouring two cups of chamomile tea.
I sat down, staring at the old photographs. One of them showed a young Patricia, perhaps in her early twenties, standing beside a tall, handsome man with striking dark hair—and piercing, sapphire-blue eyes.
My breath hitched. "Who is that?"
"That," my father said, tapping the photograph, "is Julian Vance. No relation to Dr. Evelyn Vance at the lab, ironically enough. Julian was Patricia's first fiancé."
I stared at the photograph. The blue eyes in the picture were unmistakable. They possessed the exact same unusual, intense shade as Emma's eyes.
"Patricia was engaged before she met Daniel's father?" I asked, completely bewildered. "Daniel always told me his parents were high school sweethearts!"
"That is the narrative Patricia constructed for thirty-five years," Dad explained, sliding the blue medical folder toward me. "Thirty-six years ago, Patricia was engaged to Julian. He was a prominent young engineer from a wealthy local family. But six months before their scheduled wedding, Julian died suddenly in an automobile accident."
"Oh," I whispered, feeling a sudden pang of tragic sympathy, despite my deep hatred for the woman.
"Two months after Julian's death," Dad continued, his voice dropping into a somber, calculated register, "Patricia married Richard Hayes—the man Daniel believes was his father. Richard was a quiet, modest man, deeply in love with Patricia, willing to do anything she asked. Seven months after their quiet courthouse wedding, Daniel was born."
My mind raced, connecting the dots like a sudden constellation lighting up in the dark.
"Wait..." I stammered, my head spinning. "Are you saying... Daniel isn't Richard's son?"
"Daniel was born prematurely, according to the official birth announcement Patricia put in the newspaper," Dad said, pulling out a laminated news clipping. "She claimed he was born two months early due to stress. But Richard’s family always had suspicions. Richard had dark brown eyes, dark hair, and a very specific genetic blood markers. Julian Vance, however, had recessive blue-eye alleles tracing back three generations."
I sat back in my chair, my heart pounding against my ribs. "Patricia accused me of cheating... because she was hiding her own secret!"
"Precisely," Dad said, leaning back. "When Emma was born with blue eyes, Patricia didn't see a miracle of genetic inheritance. She saw a mirror. She panicked. She believed that if people started looking closely at Emma's eye color, they would start asking questions about Daniel's eye color, about genetic probabilities, and eventually, about Julian Vance."
"So she tried to frame me first!" I gasped, horror washing over me. "She wanted to destroy my reputation and blame Emma's blue eyes on my alleged infidelity, so no one would ever suspect that Daniel's blue-eyed genetics came from HER past!"
"She projected her thirty-six-year-old sin directly onto you," Dad said grimly. "She tried to sacrifice your marriage and my granddaughter's innocence to protect her own manufactured legacy."
May you like
"Does Daniel know?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
"No," Dad said, closing the blue folder. "Daniel believes he is a purebred Hayes. He believes his father was Richard. Tomorrow morning, when Dr. Vance reads that full genomic lineage report... the entire illusion Patricia built will shatter into pieces."
