Desmond hesitated just long enough to answer the question without saying anything at all.
“Before,” Paige admitted quietly. “A few weeks before your transfer. The clinic called, said there’d been a paperwork error, said it had been resolved. We didn’t think it was worth worrying you over.”
“You knew there was a risk,” I said, my voice rising despite myself, “and you let me carry a pregnancy without telling me.”
“We didn’t think it was still a risk,” Desmond said. “They told us it was fixed.”
“It clearly mattered,” I said.
“We don’t know that,” Paige said quickly. “Maybe this is our baby. Maybe Desmond’s overreacting.”
“Look at her,” Desmond said. “Look at her hair. Her skin. Renata, no offense, but none of us have that coloring in our family. Not you, not me, not Paige.”
I looked down at the baby in my arms, really looked, for the first time since the confusion started instead of simply loving her on instinct.
He wasn’t wrong. She had a warmth to her complexion, dark curling hair, features that didn’t obviously trace back to anyone standing in that room.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said, my voice shaking. “Babies don’t always look like their parents right away.”
“I need to know,” Paige said, mostly to herself. “I can’t hold a baby not knowing if she’s actually mine.”
Something in me went cold hearing that sentence, colder than anything Desmond had said.
“She’s a baby,” I said. “Not a package that got delivered to the wrong address.”
