The living room of the Bennett estate smelled of white lilies and fresh varnish, an expensive scent meant to mask the rot beneath.

By nine o'clock the following morning, the sun was bright over the rolling hills of Galena, but the air inside the small log cabin was freezing.

Rachel sat at the kitchen table, her laptop open, surrounded by printed emails, medical receipts from five years ago, and court filings. Maddie was sitting on the rug near the woodstove, drawing a picture of a house with yellow crayons.

A sharp knock echoed against the front door.

Rachel froze, her hand hovering over her coffee mug. She stood up, walked to the window, and pulled back the curtain an inch.

It wasn't Grant.

Standing on the wooden porch was a tall, lean man in his mid-forties, wearing a dark navy wool coat and carrying a thick leather briefcase. He had sharp, analytical grey eyes and a clean-shaven jaw that carried a faint, jagged scar along the left side.

Rachel opened the door, keeping the security chain engaged. "Can I help you?"

"Rachel Vance?" the man asked, his voice low and cultured. "My name is Dr. Julian Vance. I am a forensic geneticist hired by the Department of Health Oversight Committee."

Rachel stared at him. "Vance? Any relation to—"

"Dr. Adrian Vale was my uncle," the man said smoothly. "And three days ago, I was the one who flagged your daughter's sample in the national registry."

Rachel unlatched the chain and pulled the door open. "Come in."

Julian Vance stepped into the cabin, taking off his leather gloves and bowing his head slightly toward Maddie, who looked up from her drawing.

"I won't waste your time, Mrs. Vance," Julian said, taking a seat across from the kitchen table as Rachel closed the door. "My uncle died six months ago in a private care facility in Zurich. When his estate was opened, my legal team discovered a secondary set of paper ledgers locked in a vault beneath his private estate in Lake Forest."

He opened his briefcase and pulled out a heavy, leather-bound book with yellowed pages, laying it open on the table.

"The public clinic records said your husband selected Donor #4409—a thirty-two-year-old law student from Michigan," Julian said, pointing to a column of hand-written numbers. "That was a lie. The clinic never ordered Donor #4409's material. My uncle substituted his own sample for over two hundred procedures between 1988 and 2012."

"Two hundred?" Rachel's voice cracked. "You said twenty-two last night."

"Twenty-two have opted into the public registry," Julian corrected quietly. "The total number of children born using his genetic material is two hundred and fourteen."

Rachel covered her mouth with her hand, a wave of nausea washing over her. "He played God with hundreds of families."

"He didn't just play God, Mrs. Vance," Julian said, his grey eyes darkening. "He was targeted. I went through the private ledgers. Fifty-four of those procedures were performed on women married to men from prominent Chicago families. Men who were secretly diagnosed with azoospermia at his private lab."

"Grant," Rachel whispered.

"Grant Bennett's medical record from 2018 wasn't generated by a standard lab," Julian revealed, pulling a copy of a twenty-year-old medical file from his briefcase. "His fertility testing was handled personally by Dr. Vale. But that's not the most disturbing part."

Julian flipped the page, revealing a set of two DNA profile charts side-by-side.

"When I ran the comparative matrix between your daughter's sample and the historical records from St. Jude Hospital," Julian said, looking directly into Rachel's eyes, "I didn't just find Maddie's father. I found Grant's."