Page 165 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

She opened the folder.

“Truth, I want you to understand the science before I tell you the conclusion, because I don’t want this to feel like something happening to you without you understanding why it’s happening. Is that alright?”

“Just tell me, Dr. Broussard.” My hands were flat on my thighs, pressing down like I could hold myself together through my palms. “Please.”

She held my eyes.

“The genetic testing confirms that the twins you’re carrying have two different biological fathers. This is called heteropaternal superfecundation—it happens when two eggs are fertilized by sperm from two different men, typically during the same cycle. Given what you’ve told me about the fertility clinic and the specimens that were used without your full knowledge, this explains everything the ultrasound already suggested when we first found two separate gestational sacs.”

The room got very quiet. I could hear the air conditioning ticking somewhere behind the wall.

“Two different fathers,” I repeated, like saying it slow would make it smaller. It didn’t.

“Yes.” She reached out, finally, and put her hand over mine. “The girl is a genetic match to Amai Landry. The boy is a genetic match to Kaisen Landry.”

I don’t know what sound I made. I don’t think it was a word. My hand came up over my mouth on its own, and my eyes burned instantly. The exam room tilted a little, the fluorescent light too bright and too white.

“Both babies are currently doing well,” Dr. Broussard said again, gentle but firm, the kind of steady she probably learned from delivering bad news a thousand times before mine. “I want to be very clear about that. There is no indication that either twin is in danger because of this. This is simply—this is the truth of their origin. Nothing more, nothing less.”

The truth of their origin.

I almost laughed, the kind of laugh that isn’t a laugh at all, just grief wearing a different coat. Because that was the joke of it, wasn’t it? My whole life, I’d been Truth, and here I was, sitting on a table, and finding out the truth was, two brothers, two different men, two different daddies knitted into two different bodies inside the same womb, inside me, and I hadn’t asked for a single bit of it.

“How,” I said, and my voice cracked right down the middle. “How does that even—how does that happen, Dr. Broussard? Like physically, mechanically, how⁠—”

“During the IVF procedure, if specimens from two different donors were mixed up, mislabeled, or intentionally combined without proper protocol, and two separate eggs were fertilized and implanted—it’s rare, but it’s documented. It happens most commonly in cases of infidelity in natural conception, but in a clinical setting like yours, it means someone made a catastrophic error. Or a deliberate one.”

Deliberate. That word sat in my chest like a stone.

I thought about Winston’s bitch ass. I thought about that clinic, the specimens sitting in some freezer with Landry names on them like inventory. I thought about how easy it must have been for somebody—Winston, Dr. Beaumont, whoever—to look at two vials and think, why not both? Like I was a science experiment. Like my body was just a place to test whether their bloodline could survive being split down the middle.

“I need a minute,” I said and put my face in my hands.

Dr. Broussard didn’t say anything else. She just sat there with her hand still resting lightly on my knee, letting me have the minute, and then another one after that, while I cried the ugly kind of cry, shoulders shaking, snot and all, no dignity left in me.

Because here’s what I understood, sitting on that table, that I hadn’t fully understood back at the clinic when Dr. Beaumont first told me two sperm donors had been used. Back then, it was a possibility. A scandal. A betrayal I could be furious about from a safe distance, something that happened to me because two brothers and their father were reckless with my body.

But this—this was permanent. This was a girl who would grow up looking like Amai. A boy who would grow up looking like Kaisen. Two separate men, forever, undeniably, biologically tied to two separate children inside the same set of twins, in the same delivery, in the same hospital room, on the same day. There was no fixing this. There was no scenario where I got to decide the shape of my family without both Landry brothers standing in it permanently, whether I wanted them there or not. And they hated the fuck out of each other!

I’d been telling myself a story—quiet, in the back of my mind, where I hadn’t even said it out loud to myself yet—that eventually this would resolve into something simple. One father. One man. A clean line I could draw around my life. And that story just died in this room, on this table, under this light.

“I know this is a lot,” Dr. Broussard finally said, once my breathing evened out some. “I want to remind you, gently, that these results don’t give either man any legal claim to your medical decisions. You are still the only person who decides what happens in this pregnancy, what happens during delivery, who is in the room, who gets information. Your mother remains your listed medical contact. Nothing about that has changed.”

“I know,” I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand, my makeup probably a disaster now. “I know that. I just—” I laughed again, that same broken laugh. “I thought I was ready for this. I really thought I was ready to hear it.”

“Nobody’s ready for this,” she said simply. “There’s no amount of preparing that makes this easy. I’d like to give you some resources—there’s a therapist I refer patients to who specialize in exactly this kind of reproductive trauma, and I think it would help you to talk to someone who isn’t tangled up in the situation.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay. Send me her information.”

“And Truth—” she waited until I looked at her. “The records from today are sealed under your name only. Nothing goes to either father, nothing goes to anyone in that family, unless you personally authorize it in writing. That’s not a courtesy. That’s your right.”

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it, even though my voice came out small and wrecked.

I got dressed slowly, folded the paper gown up neat like it mattered, like being tidy about something small could keep me from falling apart about everything big. Angela walked me out with the sealed envelope of results tucked into a folder, and I held it against my chest the whole way to the parking lot like it might try to get away from me.

The Mercedes was right where I left it, gleaming, beautiful, stupid in its beauty against how I felt walking toward it. My security nodded at me from his car, professional, unaware, and I gave him a small wave because I didn’t have the energy to explain why my face looked the way it looked.

I got in, closed the door, and just sat there for a long minute, the leather cool against my back, the folder heavy in my lap like it weighed more than paper had any right to weigh.