Waiting Room
Nobody ate the dinner. Somewhere behind the manor, caterers packed away four hundred dollars a plate of untouched salmon while the wedding party sat scattered across the lawn in small, shell-shocked clusters, still dressed for a celebration that no longer existed.
We ended up, absurdly, in the manor's small library — me, Griffin, Sawyer, my father, Celestine, and Holt, six people who an hour ago had been divided neatly into two families and were now tangled into something none of us had words for.
"We need to know," Griffin said. He'd taken off his jacket. His voice had gone flat with exhaustion. "Not think. Not suspect. Know."
"There's a clinic that does same-day results if you pay for it," Sawyer said quietly. It was the first thing he'd said in an hour. "My friend used it after his divorce. Custody thing."
Nobody asked how he knew that. Nobody had the energy left to be surprised by anything else today.
We drove there in near silence, four adults and two grown children who might now be four adults and three siblings, or four adults and one sibling and one stranger, and none of us said which outcome we were hoping for, because I don't think any of us knew.
The swabs took thirty seconds each. The waiting took four hours.
I sat in a plastic chair beside Griffin, still in my wedding dress because nobody had thought to bring a change of clothes to a paternity clinic, and for a long time neither of us said anything at all.
"Whatever it says," he finally told me, staring at the vending machine across the room like it held answers, "I need you to know I didn't do anything wrong. Neither did you."
"I know."
"I still love you. That doesn't just turn off because of a piece of paper."
"I know that too," I said, and it was true, and it was also the loneliest sentence I had ever agreed with.
At 11:47 that night, a nurse came out holding two sealed envelopes — one for Griffin, one for Sawyer — and asked, in the gentlest voice I have ever heard a stranger use, which one of us wanted to open them first.