You tried to use an innocent child to play me, and it almost worked.”

He offered, coldly, to pay for a month in an extended-stay motel until Mason’s fever broke, and I told him I would sleep on a bus-station bench before I took one dollar of charity from a man who thought I was a fraud.

And I began, with my hands still shaking, to pack my son’s few things.

But as I lifted that paternity report to crumple it and throw it in the bin, five years of training I had never stopped carrying — the training that had once made me a senior corporate auditor, the training that had seen through a fraud once before and paid for it with my freedom — made me stop, and look.

Really look.

And the report was wrong.