Chapter 6 - Why Eleanor Called Her a Bastard
Victor remembered Eleanor's words in the ballroom.
“This bastard child is out of control.”
He had assumed cruelty.
Now he wondered whether there was knowledge behind it.
“Who is Lily's father?”
Eleanor refused.
Victor's voice lowered.
“Thirty-eight years, Eleanor. Don't make me ask again.”
She cried.
“I don't know.”
“Then why call her that?”
“Because Emily told me Nathan wasn't the father.”
Before Emily died, she confessed she had undergone IVF.
Nathan was infertile.
They used donor sperm.
But the clinic switched the donor.
Emily discovered it after Lily was born.
She secretly tested Lily.
The result identified a familial match.
Not Nathan.
Not a stranger.
A Vale.
Victor stared.
“Who?”
Eleanor shook her head.
Emily never told her.
She feared Victor would do something irreversible.
Lily listened from across the room.
Victor hated that adults had turned her identity into a crime scene.
He knelt.
“Whatever they say, you're mine.”
Lily's eyes filled.
“Really?”
“Really.”
That was the first uncomplicated truth in the room.
Then Claire found a database in the underground clinic.
Lily's genetic profile.
Father:
RESTRICTED.
But a partial marker matched another stored profile.
PATIENT E-2.
The baby Claire carried.
Lily and the infant shared a paternal lineage.
Same father?
Possibly.
Or closely related male donors.
Someone was creating children around the same genetic line.
Why?
Dr. Kessler's work had not been primarily fertility.
It was inheritance.
He believed certain Vale genes carried unusual resistance to neurological degeneration.
Victor remembered his father.
His grandfather.
Both lived into their nineties with extraordinary cognitive health.
Kessler wanted the trait.
Children were being created as living genetic trials.
Lily had been one.
Claire's baby another.
Emily had discovered it.
That was why she was targeted.
But who supplied the paternal genetic material?
They found an old donor inventory.
One sample:
V-01.
Collected thirty-one years earlier.
Victor calculated.
He would have been thirty-seven.
He looked at Eleanor.
“No.”
Eleanor's face told him everything.
Years earlier, during routine fertility testing after they struggled to conceive another child, Victor had provided samples.
The clinic preserved them illegally.
Kessler later acquired the archive.
Victor's own genetic material could have been used.
If so—
Lily might not merely be his granddaughter.
Biologically, she could be his daughter.
Victor stared at the little girl.
Then at the records.
But before anyone could accept the conclusion, Claire found another page.
V-01 was not Victor.
The donor's first name was:
Vincent.
May you like
Victor's identical twin brother.
The brother who disappeared forty years earlier.
