Judge Ellison lifted the DNA report from the envelope and read it in complete silence, his reading glasses catching the fluorescent light. I watched his jaw tighten line by line. When he finally looked up, his face had turned to stone, and his eyes moved to Rosalind with an expression I had waited eight months to see. “Mrs. Waverly,” he said slowly, his voice filling the room, “why does this report say the youngest child belongs to his brother?” A gasp went through the gallery. Rosalind’s lawyer set down his expensive pen. Rosalind herself had gone the color of paper, her victory smirk nowhere to be found.

The report was undeniable. Damian, our oldest at twelve, was mine. Coralie, at nine, was mine. But Silas, the six-year-old I had rocked to sleep, taught to ride a bike, carried on my shoulders through three summers, was not my biological son. The genetic markers matched, instead, my own younger brother, Nathaniel, who had stayed with us for a summer six years earlier while he got back on his feet. Rosalind had known. She had known every single day she smiled at me across the breakfast table, every day she planned this divorce, every day she calculated the one point two million dollars she intended to take. And she had counted on my never finding out.