Judge Fairbanks opened the envelope himself. He read the first page in silence, then the second, and I watched his face harden from impatience into something colder. He looked up at Rosalind, then back at the report, then at Rosalind again. “Mrs. Bramwell,” he said, his voice like a dropped stone, “why does this report say the youngest child belongs to his brother?” A gasp moved through the courtroom. Rosalind’s lawyer set down his expensive pen. And Rosalind, who had smirked for eight months, went the color of the paper in the judge’s hand.

The report was unambiguous. Elliot and Jolene were mine. But Wyatt, the six-year-old I had rocked to sleep and taught to ride a bike, was not. The genetic markers pointed instead to my own younger brother, Colin, who had lived in our guest room for two years during what Rosalind once called “a rough patch.” I had suspected nothing until eight months of a scorched-earth divorce made me want, for the first time in my life, to be certain of what I was paying for. Seventy-two hours ago, certainty arrived in a lab envelope. Now it was sitting on a judge’s bench, and Rosalind’s entire strategy was collapsing in real time.