Part 2

It took nearly an entire day to get Claire’s phone number. Finally, one of her former coworkers gave it to me after asking why I needed it. When I called, I recognized her voice instantly.

“Hello?”

“Claire. It’s Daniel.”

Silence. Then: “They told you.”

“Some of it.”

“What do you want?”

The question shouldn’t have been difficult, but it was. “I need to know whether I have a child.”

Claire didn’t answer immediately. Then she said: “Yes.”

I had to sit down. “I want to meet him.”

“He doesn’t know who you are.”

Two days later, she gave me an address in Long Beach. An older woman opened the door—I recognized Claire’s mother, Helen. Inside the apartment, I saw a small backpack by the wall, tiny sneakers under a bench, and plastic dinosaurs scattered across the coffee table.

Then a little boy walked into the room. He was about four and a half, with dark hair and wide brown eyes.

“Luke,” Claire said softly. “Say hello.”

The boy looked at me. “Hi, sir.”

I couldn’t answer immediately. He didn’t look exactly like me, but when he became nervous, he tilted his head in exactly the same way I always had.

Claire placed a folder on the table. Inside was the birth certificate.

• Name: Luke Bennett

• Mother: Claire Bennett

• Father: Daniel Brooks

My name. It had been there since the day he was born.

“Why didn’t you find me?”

Claire looked at me calmly. “I called you. You blocked me. I emailed you.” (I had abandoned that email account after moving to Canada.) “Then I went to your mother’s house.”

My stomach tightened. “Was Lauren there?”

Claire gave a sad smile. “Now you’re beginning to understand.”

She told me that the day she came to my mother’s house, Lauren had walked outside carrying an envelope with twenty thousand dollars inside. Lauren told Claire that I knew about the pregnancy, that I didn’t want to reconcile, that I wanted nothing to do with the baby, and that the money was supposed to help Claire “start over quietly.”

“I didn’t take a dollar,” Claire said. “I gave Lauren my new phone number and told her that if you really wanted nothing to do with your own child, then you needed to tell me yourself.”

I stared at the floor. “I never got your number.”

“I know.” Then Claire added, “There’s something else. Before our divorce, there was a medical report that supposedly showed I had serious fertility problems. I kept my original copy. My mother has one too. Compare them.”

That evening, I went through boxes of old paperwork for hours until I found it. Same medical center, same date, same patient number. But there were additional lines on my mother’s copy—lines that made Claire appear to be almost entirely responsible for our inability to conceive.

The next morning, we took both documents back to the clinic. Their answer was immediate: Claire’s copy matched the official medical record. My mother’s copy did not.

I walked out holding the altered paper and understood something terrifying. Someone hadn’t only interfered with what happened after our divorce—someone had manipulated one of the very reasons our marriage had fallen apart in the first place.

I just needed to find out who.

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