“Yes,” Dr. Thorne said, his voice grave. “I personally re-ran the original samples two hours ago under my own supervision. I didn’t want to wait until morning to correct this. The child, Ethan Hale, is a $99.9%$ genetic match to Julian Hale. There is no doubt. He is your biological son.”

A deafening silence followed. It was as if the very air had turned to lead. I looked at Julian, whose face had gone ghostly white. He looked at the paper in his hand, then at the doctor, and finally, he looked at me. But I didn’t look back at him with love. I looked at him with the clarity of someone who had just seen a monster in the light.

“Who?” Julian whispered, his voice trembling. “Who would change the results?”

Dr. Thorne turned his gaze to Diane. “The IP address used to access the terminal was traced back to a private VPN registered to this estate. And more importantly, our lead technician, a Mr. Miller, confessed an hour ago that he was paid a very large sum of money to facilitate the ‘adjustment.’ He was quite specific about who approached him at the country club last week.”

Julian turned to his mother, his eyes wide with a realization that should have come years ago. “Mother? What did you do?”

Diane didn’t flinch. She stood her ground, her chin tilted high, though her eyes burned with a desperate, trapped fury. “I did what was necessary for this family, Julian! I saw the way she was changing you. Making you soft. Making you care more about that boy and a ‘simple life’ than the legacy we’ve built for generations. She doesn’t belong here. I was saving you from a life of mediocrity!”

“By lying to me about my own son?” Julian’s voice rose to a roar, a sound of pure agony. “You were going to let me throw my wife and child onto the street based on a lie you manufactured?”

“She would have been compensated,” Diane said coldly. “She would have gone back to whatever hole she crawled out of, and you could have married someone of our own kind. Someone who understands what it means to be a Hale.”

I didn’t stay to hear the rest. I didn’t care about Diane’s excuses or Julian’s sudden, frantic apologies as he stepped toward me, reaching out a hand I no longer wanted to touch.