I frowned, skipping to the next voicemail. This one was from Adrian. It wasn’t the arrogant, dismissive man from the lawyer’s office two hours ago. It was a man who sounded utterly destroyed.

“They’re saying it’s not mine,” he choked out, the background noise echoing like a hospital hallway. “The doctor… the blood tests came back.

Chloe’s baby isn’t mine. Please pick up the phone. I made a mistake.”

I sat frozen in the hard plastic airport chair, the audio playing directly into my ear as the reality of what was happening across town finally clicked into place.

During their little celebration in the VIP suite, the doctor had brought in the comprehensive genetic panel they had so proudly demanded. They wanted to see the genetic markers of their golden boy. Instead, the doctor had to sit down and explain a very harsh medical reality.

Chloe had been sleeping with someone else. The DNA didn’t match.

But it didn’t stop there. As the voicemails continued to flood my phone, piecing together the chaotic scene at the clinic, the full, devastating truth came out. Adrian hadn’t just been betrayed by his young mistress; he had been confronted with a medical absolute. Three years ago, Adrian had suffered a severe, complicated infection. He had brushed it off, refusing to see a specialist until it was almost too late.

The clinic’s detailed blood work didn’t just show that Chloe’s baby wasn’t his. The doctor ran his numbers to figure out why, and the results were definitive. The infection had caused permanent, irreversible damage. Adrian was completely sterile. He had a zero percent chance of ever fathering another child.

My children, Leo and Maya—the kids his family had spent years looking down on, the kids he had just signed away without a second thought because they were “holding him back”—were the only biological children he would ever have.

And he had just legally handed them over to me, giving me full permission to take them across the globe, just so he could rush to celebrate another man’s baby.

I listened to a third voicemail. It was Eleanor again, full-on weeping now. “Bring them back,” she sobbed into the receiver. “Bring my grandchildren back to me. Please. We’ll cancel the divorce. We’ll fix this. Just don’t take them.”

I looked up from my phone. Maya had dropped a piece of cheese on the floor and was giggling as Leo tried to carefully pick it up with a napkin. They were so beautiful, so oblivious to the chaos unraveling in a clinic miles away. They didn’t know that their father’s shiny new life had just burned to the ground in a matter of seconds. They didn’t know that the grandmother who barely hugged them was currently having a mental breakdown in a luxury medical suite.

“Flight 482 to Zurich is now ready for boarding,” the intercom echoed overhead.