He had spent the evening, apparently, not agonizing over whether his wife had betrayed him or his son was his son, but consulting counsel and composing a message designed to control the spread of information. Let’s keep this quiet. The let’s was the worst part — the casual assumption that I would of course want the same thing he wanted, that my interest and his were aligned, that we were partners in the project of protecting the Selwyn name from embarrassment.

He was managing me the way his father had managed Fabian’s mother thirty years before: identify the threat to the family’s reputation, and neutralize it quietly, with a lawyer and an understanding.

I did not know about Bertram yet, that night.

But I was, without knowing it, looking at the exact inheritance that had made all of this possible — a family reflex, generations deep, to meet an inconvenient truth not with honesty but with containment.

Chapter 7 — The Test

That afternoon I ordered an expedited legal paternity test — not because I had a shred of doubt, but because I understood, even then, that I was going to need the truth in a form Matthias could not argue with.