I pressed my cheek to hers.
“Listen to me carefully,” I said.
Mark looked up.
“I will do the DNA test. Not because you deserve it, but because Lily deserves to have the truth documented before anyone else tries to weaponize it against her.”
He nodded quickly.
“Thank you.”
“I’m not finished.”
His face fell.
“The test will be handled through my attorney. The results will go to her first. Until then, you are not to hold Lily, post about her, announce her birth, or make decisions for her. You can visit only when I approve it.”
His mouth opened.
“That’s my daughter.”
“You weren’t sure five minutes ago.”
He looked as if I had struck him.
Good.
Rachel arrived forty minutes later in a charcoal suit, her hair twisted into a neat bun, her expression calm enough to scare people. She entered the hospital room like she already owned every argument in it.
She congratulated me first. She looked at Lily and smiled softly.
Then she turned to Mark.
“I understand you requested a paternity test.”
Mark glanced at me.
“Yes.”
Rachel placed her briefcase on the small table.
“Then we’ll do this properly.”
She produced paperwork with frightening efficiency: consent forms, chain-of-custody instructions, a temporary separation agreement, and a document limiting unsupervised access until legal parentage was confirmed.
Mark stared at the stack.
“This is extreme.”
Rachel looked at him over her glasses.
“Accusing your wife of infidelity in a hospital room shortly after childbirth is also extreme.”
David almost smiled.
Mark signed.
The nurse returned with a lab technician. Swabs were taken from Mark, Lily, and me. Lily cried for exactly seven seconds, a small furious sound that broke my heart and rebuilt it in the same breath.
Mark reached toward her instinctively.
I turned away.
His hand froze midair.
For the first time, he understood that there were doors love could close from the inside.
The next two days passed in fragments.
Feeding Lily. Signing forms. Ignoring Mark’s calls. Watching sunlight slide across the hospital walls while my body healed slower than my heart hardened.
Carol came once without Mark. She stood in the doorway holding a stuffed rabbit and a bouquet of white roses.
“I know I have no right,” she said. “But may I see her?”
I almost said no.
Then I saw her hands trembling around the rabbit.
I nodded.
She approached the bed like Lily was holy.
“She looks like you,” Carol whispered.
“She looks like herself.”
Carol’s lips quivered.
“Yes. She does.”
She sat beside me for a long moment without speaking. Then she said, “I should have told him years ago.”
“Yes.”
“I thought I was protecting him.”