Part 2 — Two Tests, Same Impossible Answer
Neither of us said anything for what felt like a full minute. David just kept turning his phone toward me and back to himself, like the screen might change if he looked at it enough times.
“Say something,” I finally managed.
“I don’t—” He set the phone down on the counter like it had burned him. “Rachel, I don’t understand what I’m looking at.”
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about a moment like this: your brain tries to make it make sense, even when it can’t. My first thought, God help me, was that David had cheated and somehow the lab flagged it wrong. My second thought was that maybe I had, in some accidental, impossible way. We stood in our kitchen doing the math out loud, both of us too afraid to say the real words.
“If it was just you who didn’t match her,” David said slowly, “I’d think—” He stopped.
“You’d think I cheated.” I finished it for him because somebody had to. “And if it was just me, you’d think the same about yourself. But it’s both of us.”
We stared at each other. Married nineteen years, and I had never seen that particular look on his face — somewhere between grief and confusion, like his whole skeleton had lost its shape.
