"Everything in here," Michael said finally, "you took good care of."
Ethan looked at the four objects in their row — the photograph, the card, the drawing, the sticker — and then he looked at Michael, and his expression did something complicated that he was too young to hide and too tired to sustain.
"Mom said if I ever saw you, I should ask," he said. "So I did."
"I know," Michael said. "I'm glad you did."
He folded the bag's top closed again, gently, and set it on the counter where it would be safe. He didn't know what the bag had cost the boy to carry. He was beginning to understand that he might spend a long time finding out.
* * *
Chapter 7: Ninety-Nine Point Nine Nine
The swab took eleven seconds.
A nurse at the clinic on Boylston Street — brisk, kind, the kind of efficient that made Michael feel like he was the one being inefficient — ran a cotton swab along the inside of Ethan's cheek, sealed it in a tube, labeled it in front of them both, and said the results would take three to five business days. Ethan had asked if it would hurt, and when it didn't, he looked faintly disappointed, as if he'd braced himself for nothing.
"That's it?" he'd said.
"That's it," the nurse said.
Michael had his own cheek swabbed next, and they walked out into the October afternoon, and Ethan asked if they could get hot chocolate, and Michael said yes, and that was the easy part.
The waiting was not easy.
He knew, of course. He knew with the kind of certainty that didn't need a laboratory — the photograph, the timeline, Claire's face in the hospital bed, the way Ethan held his fork exactly the way Michael's father had held his. He knew. But knowing and having it printed on letterhead were different things, and the three days stretched out like a held breath.
He worked. He always worked when he didn't know what else to do. He sat through depositions and heard every third word. He reviewed a merger agreement and read the same paragraph four times. His paralegal asked if he was all right; he said he was fine.
At night, Ethan slept in the guest room down the hall — the room that had been an office, hastily converted with a bed borrowed from a colleague and sheets Lily had helped pick out, pale blue with small white stars. Michael lay awake and listened to the apartment's unfamiliar sounds: the radiators ticking, the refrigerator cycling, the faint creak of the guest-room bed when Ethan turned over. Twice he got up and stood in the hallway, listening for the boy's breathing. He had done the same thing when Lily was born, standing over her crib at 3 a.m. with his hand hovering above her chest. Some instincts didn't need permission.
On the second day, Claire called from the hospital. Her voice was thin but steady.
"Any news?"
"Three to five days," he said. "They said three to five."
"And you're climbing the walls."
"I'm fine."
"Michael." Just his name, in that tone she used to use in Newport when he was lying about being relaxed. "He's yours. You know he's yours."
"I know," he said quietly. "I just want it to be — official. For him. So nobody can ever — " He stopped.
"So nobody can ever take him away," she finished.
He didn't answer, because she was right and they both knew it.
On the morning of the third day, the clinic called at 9:14. Michael was in his office with the door closed, a brief open on his desk that he hadn't touched. The nurse — a different one, younger, reading from a script — said the results were in and would he like them by email or would he prefer to come in.
"Email," he said. "Please."
"It should arrive within the hour."
He sat at his desk and watched the clock, answering two emails he barely read. At 9:47, his inbox chimed.
The email had a PDF attached. The PDF had a letterhead, a case number, a table of genetic markers with numbers he didn't understand, and at the bottom, in bold:
*Probability of paternity: 99.99%*
He read it three times. Then he printed it, because some things needed to exist on paper. He held the printout in both hands and looked at the number until it stopped looking like a number and started looking like a fact.
99.99%. As close to certain as science got. The remaining hundredth of a percent was the space where doubt lived, and there was no doubt left in him to fill it.
He called Claire first. She answered on the second ring.
"It's positive," he said. "Ninety-nine point nine nine."
There was a silence. Then he heard her exhale — a long, shaky breath, like someone setting down something heavy.