The neighborhood grapevine filled in the rest. Michael had secretly swabbed the infant and rushed it to a rapid-testing lab. He came back not just with the negative paternity result, but with a second envelope: a fresh fertility analysis confirming what I’d known for years.

He was sterile.

Pam described the audio of it. Michael throwing furniture, roaring, shoving the paperwork in Khloe’s face and demanding the truth. Khloe, cornered and stripped of her victimhood, breaking down into ugly sobs, swearing she didn’t know, swearing she thought it was his.

But Diane’s reaction was the poetic part. The woman who’d tormented me for my “barrenness,” who’d paraded an illegitimate child as her royal heir, came apart completely.

She screamed at Khloe, calling her a diseased harlot, and tried to physically wrench the baby away to throw them both out into the street.

The commotion drew the whole floor into the hall.