There was a symmetry in that, which Alex did not miss, standing in his mother’s parlor and hearing Elena’s words come out of his own mouth.

Because the entire tragedy had been built on his family’s belief in the opposite principle, the belief that biology was everything, that blood was destiny, that a Vance was owed an heir and a grandmother was owed grandchildren and a bloodline was a thing that conferred rights simply by existing.

That belief was the engine of all of it: it was why Beatrice had needed an heir badly enough to destroy her son’s marriage, why she had run a secret DNA test to confirm the babies were truly Vance blood before deciding whether they were worth acknowledging, why she now stood in her parlor demanding access to grandchildren on the strength of a genetic connection alone.

For the Vances, biology had always been the whole of the argument.