“You really believed that?” he asked. He revealed he now worked in a genetics lab and remembered when my wife had spoken to him about the test. “The result you received?” he said.
“It shouldn’t have been possible.”
A chill ran through me. He explained that sometimes hospital labs mix up samples, and my wife had asked him if the results could have been wrong. He had advised that only a second test could confirm anything—but neither she nor I pursued it.
Suddenly, the last three years—the distance I had created, the child I had abandoned—felt suffocating. I had acted on suspicion alone, never seeking certainty. For the first time in years, a terrifying thought gripped me: what if I had been wrong?
What if the boy I rejected was actually my son? And what if everything I destroyed—the family I walked away from—had crumbled under nothing more than my own doubt?
