“I guess it wasn’t a joke after all.”
We talked for three hours that night. By the end, we’d both agreed to take another DNA test. This one comparing Rachel to Gerald and Diane. The results would be ready in 10 days, just in time for my engagement party.
Over the next week, I built my case like a prosecutor preparing for trial. First, the documents. I had my original Gan Trust report showing 0% match with both Gerald and Diane. I had Margaret Sullivan’s handwritten shift log from 1997, which she’d finally agreed to let me photograph. I had a notorized statement from Margaret signed before a witness at her attorney’s office. Her own decision, she said, to finally clear her conscience.
“The hospital threatened me for 28 years,”
she told me when I picked up the document.
“I’m 72 now. What are they going to do? Fire me from retirement?”
Second, the DNA. Rachel had submitted her samples to Gan Trust using the same expedited process I had. Her results comparing to Gerald and Diane would arrive two days before the engagement party.
Third, the witnesses. My grandmother Elellanar would be there, of course. She’d been waiting 28 years for this moment. Margaret Sullivan agreed to attend, sitting quietly in the corner until needed, and Rachel, my biological sister in spirit, if not in genetics, would be waiting in the room next door.
“Are you sure about this?” Nathan asked as we reviewed the plan together. “Confronting him publicly. There’s no taking it back.”
I thought about my mother, about the bottle of sleeping pills, about 28 years of being called a liar, a cheater, a—
“He wanted a public reckoning,”
I said.
“He sent that email to 47 people. He called me a cuckoo’s egg in front of the entire family.”
I straightened the stack of documents on my desk.
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