My Husband's DNA Test Said Our Baby Wasn't His novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Toothbrush

Floyd comes for his clothes and begs for a name; Emme books her own lab and sees a text on his phone.

Floyd came for his clothes at nine that night.

He didn't use his key. He knocked on his own front door and waited on the mat with a duffel bag in his hand.

I opened it with Eli on my hip.

"I'm only here for my things," he said.

"Then come in and get them."

He went down the hall and stopped in the nursery doorway.

Eli's mobile was turning over the crib, small felt stars on a wire. Floyd stood and watched it go around.

His shoulders started to shake.

I had been braced for anger. I had not been braced for this.

"Dad had your ex swabbed this afternoon," he said, without turning. "And my brother."

"My ex?"

"Doc ran them himself. Both came back the same as ours. Excluded."

I held Eli a little tighter.

"The same day?" I said. "Floyd, the lab we went to for Eli's newborn screening took nine days."

"Doc's got a friend there who rushes things for him."

He said it flatly, the way you repeat something you were told and haven't checked.

Then he turned around. His face was wet, and he didn't wipe it.

"Give me a name, Emme," he whispered. "Just a name, and I'll forgive you. I swear to God."

My chest hurt.

He was begging me to confess to something I hadn't done, and he was offering to be kind about it.

"There's no name," I said.

"Then we test every man who was at that party." He wiped his face with his wrist. "Starting with the ones you knew."

"Your mother came by this morning."

He went still.

"She said Eli has your ear," I said. "She said you have that exact ear."

"My mother says a lot of things when she's scared."

"She wasn't scared. She was sure."

He shook his head. He didn't want to hear it, and I watched him decide not to.

"I'm taking a shower," he said. "Then I'm going back to the ranch."

I put Eli down in his crib and stood at the nursery door and listened to the water come on.

I stood there for the length of one song on the baby monitor.

Then I walked into our bathroom.

His phone sat face down on the sink, next to his toothbrush in the cup.

I took the toothbrush out and slid it into a zip bag from the kitchen drawer. I pressed the seal shut with my thumbnail.

The water was still running when I did it.

I knew what it was. I knew what he would say if he saw.

He would say I had gone behind his back, and he would be right.

But he had gone behind mine on Thursday, and he had put a sealed envelope next to my plate while his father watched.

I went back to my bedroom with the bag in my hand and sat on the edge of the bed.

On my phone I had already found a lab in Austin.

It was independent. It had no connection to anyone in the Stallworth family. It did three-way tests, mother and child and alleged father, all at once.

The mother and baby had to be swabbed in person. The father's sample could be sent by mail, a toothbrush or a cup or a hair.

I booked the first slot they had and checked the box that said RUSH.

The earliest I could get there was Wednesday morning. They promised results in two days after that.

Friday, then. Before the lawyer came out.

The shower shut off.

I heard the towel rack, and then the door.

Floyd walked out in his work shirt with his hair wet and the duffel over his shoulder. He didn't look into the bedroom.

"I'll call you," he said.

"All right."

He went into the bathroom again to get his phone, and I heard him stop.

I got up and went to the doorway.

He was standing at the sink with his phone in his hand and his eyes on the cup.

He had noticed the toothbrush was gone.

For two seconds he did nothing. Then he looked at the empty cup, and at me.

"It's not there," he said.

"I know."

He opened his mouth. And his phone lit up in his hand.

The screen was turned toward me. I read it before he flipped it over.

It was from Doc Barksdale.

Don't talk to her alone. Stay at the ranch tonight.

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