Chapter 5: Ninety-Nine Point Nine

The lab emailed me the result at 9:02 on Friday morning.

I didn't open it.

Nils had made me promise to read it in his conference room at the boatyard, with his lawyer present and his mother in the next chair.

I went because I wanted the whole room to hear it.

Pia drove me. She parked in the visitor spot and said, "I'll be right outside the glass."

The room smelled of varnish and burnt coffee.

Through the window behind the long table you could see the hulls on their stands in the yard.

Nils sat at one end with his lawyer, a man in a gray suit with a legal pad.

Birgit sat on his right.

Kristin sat on his left, in a cream cardigan, with one hand on her stomach and a tissue in the other.

"Go ahead, Britta," Nils said. "Read it out."

I opened the email on my phone and handed it to the lawyer without reading it.

He put on his glasses.

"Probability of paternity," he said. "Ninety-nine point nine nine percent."

Nobody moved.

"For whom?" said Birgit.

"Mr. Nils Ekdahl is the biological father of the fetus Mrs. Ekdahl is carrying."

Birgit set her jaw.

"Well," she said. "There."

Kristin pressed the tissue to her mouth and said, "Oh, thank God."

I looked at Nils.

His face had gone pale.

He was staring at the lawyer's paper.

"It's mine," he said.

"It's yours," I said.

"The baby's mine." He said it again, softly. "Britta, it's ours."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Husband Made Me Take a DNA Test While I Was Pregnant With His Baby from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.