Chapter 3: What Evelyn Said
Grant answered the call on the fourth ring.
He didn't put it on speaker.
He turned slightly away from me, toward the window, and said, "Mom."
I watched his shoulders.
They dropped the moment she started speaking.
"She knows," he said quietly.
A pause.
"No.
All of it.
The clinic.
The DNA." Another pause, longer this time.
"I understand."
He ended the call and stood with his back to me for a moment before he turned around.
"She wants to come over."
"No," I said.
"Rachel—"
"Grant.
No.
Not tonight.
Not until you tell me everything first."
He pulled out a chair and sat down heavily.
He looked older than I had ever seen him.
He pressed both hands flat on the table the way a man does when he needs something solid under him.
"The doctor's name was Harlan Voss," he said.
"He ran the fertility clinic.
He also treated our family for years when I was a child.
My mother trusted him completely."
"How long have you known what he did to you?"
"Since I was twenty-three.
My mother told me the year before we got married." He looked up.
"She told me it was better left alone.
That he was old.
That nothing could be undone."
"She told you to protect him."
"She told me to protect our family."
"Those are not the same thing."
He didn't answer that.
I got up and walked to the counter.
I needed to move.
I needed to not be sitting across from him while he said these things so calmly.
"Grant, that man used his position to father children through his own patients.
Maddie is one of them.
Our daughter." I turned around.
"Do you understand what that means legally?
Ethically?
What it means for the other families?"
"I know what it means."
"Then why did you tell me not to investigate?"
"Because I knew where it would lead." His voice was low.
"Back to my mother.
Back to everything she's spent thirty years keeping buried."
"What does Evelyn have to do with it beyond knowing?"
He was quiet for too long.
"Grant.
What does your mother have to do with it?"
He looked at the table.
"She wasn't just his patient, Rachel.
She was his — she was involved with him.
For years.
Before she married my father.
And after."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"The photograph," I said.
"Yes."
"How long after?"
He closed his eyes.
"Long enough that my father always wondered.
Long enough that I've wondered too.
About myself."
I stared at him.
"You think Harlan Voss might be your biological father."
He didn't say yes.
He didn't say no.
He just sat there with his hands flat on the table and let the silence answer for him.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
A text from an unknown number.
*Mrs.
Calloway.
My name is Diane Marsh.
I was a patient at the Voss clinic in 1991.
I believe we need to talk.
I am not the only one who has been looking for answers.*
I read it twice.
Then I looked at Grant.
"Someone else already knows."
May you like
He reached for the phone.
I picked it up before he could.
