He was looking for a hospital bill.

He found a folder instead, tucked among the ordinary files, labeled only with two letters: PV.

Inside it were flight reservations, and a long thread of messages with Vance, and a single PDF.

The PDF was a prenatal paternity test, completed months earlier, well before the birth.

Its conclusion, stated in the flat clinical language of a laboratory that has no idea what it is destroying, was that Vance was the biological father of the child, with a probability greater than ninety-nine point nine percent.

Rebecca had known.