Chapter 4 - THE IMPOSSIBLE DNA
When I finally regained consciousness, I was lying on a cot in an empty recovery room, a cold washcloth draped over my forehead. Brandon was sitting beside me, his head buried in his hands, his shoulders shaking with silent, suppressed sobs. The sterile smell of the hospital was nauseating. Everything that had happened in the past three hours felt like a fever dream, a horrific hallucination brought on by stress. But the crushing weight in my chest told me it was real.
I sat up slowly, the room tilting slightly. "Brandon?"
He looked up, his eyes bloodshot and swollen. He grabbed my hand, squeezing it so tightly it ached. "I'm so sorry, Sarah. I am so, so sorry."
"How is this possible?" I demanded, the tears spilling over my cheeks. "I was pregnant! I went through the IVF treatments. I gave birth to him! How can he not be ours?"
Brandon wiped his face, his expression hardening into a mask of pure devastation and fury. "I just got off the phone with Detective Harris. They're investigating the fertility clinic we used—the Genesis Institute. Sarah, do you remember who recommended that clinic? Who paid for our final round of IVF when we ran out of savings?"
The memory surfaced, coated in a sickening film of realization. Five years ago, we had been desperate, broken by three failed cycles. Madeline had swooped in, playing the role of the benevolent matriarch. She had written a check for fifty thousand dollars and insisted we use her "personal friend," a highly exclusive fertility specialist named Dr. Vance. We had been so grateful. We had thanked her with tears in our eyes.
"Madeline," I whispered, the name tasting like ash in my mouth.
"I drove home while you were unconscious," Brandon confessed, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. "I broke into my mother's private home office. She wasn't there; she was at her country club, acting like nothing happened. I tore her desk apart. I found a locked safe and smashed it open with a hammer."
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a stack of heavily redacted medical documents and bank statements. He tossed them onto the hospital bed.
"She paid Dr. Vance," Brandon said, his voice breaking. "She paid him two million dollars through a shell corporation. She paid him to swap our embryos, Sarah. She paid him to implant us with a stranger's child."
I picked up the papers with trembling hands. My eyes scanned the sterile, typed words, documenting the ultimate betrayal. My own mother-in-law had stolen my biological child. She had robbed me of my bloodline and tricked me into carrying another woman's baby.
"Why?" I screamed, the sound tearing from my throat like a wounded animal. "Why would she do this? What happened to our real embryo? And whose baby is Luke?!"
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"That's the sickest part," Brandon said, standing up and pacing the room. "The files don't say whose embryo you carried. But they do say what happened to ours. She didn't destroy it, Sarah. She had it implanted into someone else. Someone she deemed 'worthy' of the Hayes family legacy. She stole our biological child and gave it away, and forced us to raise a child she could torture for sport."
The door to the room suddenly opened, and a tall, broad-shouldered man in a trench coat walked in, flashing a gold badge. "Mr. and Mrs. Hayes? I'm Detective Harris. We need to talk about your mother. Because we just found Dr. Vance dead in his office."
