Chapter 21: Zero Percent

The judge's chambers were small, and everyone sat too close.

I took the chair by the window with my lawyer on one side and Ty on the other.

Shelby sat across from us in a cream sweater, gripping her purse, with the man in the navy suit beside her.

Eli was at the family center down the hall with a social worker and a bin of dinosaurs.

The judge held a single page.

"I have the results of Ms. Roark's test," she said.

"I'll read them in front of everyone, so nobody hears them secondhand."

Shelby sat straighter.

"I'm his mother," she said. "Whatever this says."

"Ms. Roark, the laboratory compared your sample to the child's. The probability that you are Eli's biological mother is zero."

The room didn't make a sound.

Shelby looked at the judge and then at the navy suit, and she smiled a little, confused.

"That's wrong," she said.

"The lab ran it twice."

"I delivered him. I was in labor for fourteen hours. I have a scar."

"I'm sure you do," the judge said, not unkindly.

"I'm not saying you didn't deliver a child. I'm saying the child you delivered is not this boy."

Shelby stood up.

Her chair tipped over behind her.

"Somebody switched it," she said. "Somebody paid the lab."

She pointed at me.

"Her. She's got money now. She's got a lawyer, she's got the owner's wife..."

"Shelby," Ty said.

"Don't. Don't you dare."

"I didn't pay anyone," I said quietly.

"You took him! You've been taking him piece by piece for two months!"

The man in the navy suit cleared his throat.

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