Chapter 7 - The man without a name
We tested Louisa properly.
Then me.
The results confirmed she was biologically mine.
That mattered more than anything else.
Whoever her biological father was, she was my daughter.
Always.
Then investigators ran the available paternal profile against legally accessible databases.
No direct match.
But one distant familial connection appeared.
A family named Whitmore.
The name meant nothing to me.
It meant everything to Walter.
When police mentioned it during questioning, his attorney immediately ended the interview.
Why?
I investigated.
Twenty-seven years earlier, Walter had worked as chief financial officer for Whitmore Biotech.
Its founder, Harrison Whitmore, died under controversial circumstances.
The company collapsed.
Walter emerged wealthy.
Very wealthy.
Nobody had ever explained how.
Then I found Harrison's son.
Adrian Whitmore.
Forty-one.
Biotech investor.
Never married.
No publicly known children.
I stared at his photograph.
Then at Louisa.
Same eyes.
I refused to jump to conclusions.
A photograph wasn't DNA.
But Adrian had been a patient at Price Fertility.
His attorney confirmed frozen genetic material had been stored there years earlier.
Without Adrian's authorization, some samples disappeared.
My stomach twisted.
This wasn't an accidental embryo mix-up.
Someone had deliberately used his sample.
Why me?
I had never met Adrian.
Then my mother called.
I hadn't told her anything beyond the abuse.
When I mentioned Whitmore, she went silent.
“Mom?”
Nothing.
“Do you know that name?”
She began crying.
“Joanna… come home.”
May you like
My mother knew.
And suddenly I realized this story had started long before I married Elmer.
