“That’s impossible,” she whispered. She looked at me, her eyes wide and wet. “Ben, you know me. You know I’ve never. I swear to you on my life, I’ve never even looked at another man.”

“I know,” I said. And the weird thing is, I did know. I believed her completely.

We sat there in the quiet kitchen while the coffee pot hissed behind us. The truth started to settle into the room like cold dust. It wasn’t Sarah. It was the clinic.

I grabbed my truck keys from the hook. The little blue silicone Lakeside logo caught the morning light. I felt a sick, hollow weight in my chest.

I called the clinic’s main number three times that morning. Each time, I was placed on hold.

Their hold music was a tinny, synthesized flute loop that played over and over. I sat on the edge of our bed, listening to that flute for forty-two minutes while Sarah sat on the floor by the closet, her knees pulled to her chest.

Finally, a receptionist transferred me to a woman who identified herself as Mrs. Vance from the legal department.

Her voice was different from the cheerful nurses we had worked with years ago. It was careful, flat, and completely devoid of emotion.

“Mr. Brennan,” she said, after I demanded an explanation for the DNA results. “We would like to schedule a formal meeting with you and your wife. We have identified a procedural irregularity from our 2016 audit.”

“What does that mean?” I shouted, my voice cracking. “What is an irregularity?”

“We will discuss the details in person, Mr. Brennan. Please come in tomorrow at ten.”

We didn’t sleep that night. We just lay in the dark, listening to the wind rattle the loose storm window in our bedroom.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Emma’s face. She had my wife’s hazel eyes, but she had a tiny, distinctive dimple on her chin that neither of us had. I had always joked that it was a throwback to some distant relative. Now, that joke felt like a knife in my ribs.

At ten o’clock the next morning, we were sitting in a polished conference room at Lakeside Fertility Clinic.

Mrs. Vance sat across from us. She was a middle-aged woman in a expensive gray suit, and she had a thick cream-colored folder resting on the table. She offered us bottled water, which we didn’t touch.

“In 2016, our laboratory underwent a transitional phase with our batching optimization protocols,” Mrs. Vance began, using words that sounded like they had been scrubbed by a team of twenty lawyers.

“Speak English,” I said. My knuckles were white against the edge of the conference table.

She paused, looking down at her folder. “There was a sample mix-up on the afternoon of May twelfth, 2016. Due to a technician error during a high-volume shift, your wife was fertilized with a sample from another client.”