Dr.

Okonkwo quietly closed his office door.

“If these families never asked to withdraw their samples,” he said, “then someone was deliberately preventing DNA matches from ever being found.

Systematically.

For years.” “Why would anyone do that?” I asked, my voice shaking.

“That,” he said, “is what the state will have to determine.” And I understood, sitting in that office, that whatever had been done to me had been done to twelve other families too, and that I was no longer only fighting for my own son.

Chapter 13 — The Lemon Cake