That is why the laboratory had returned a ninety-nine point nine percent biological match, and why he had believed, for all these months, that the result proved Mateo was his son.

But it proved no such thing.

Arthur had not paid a private laboratory to confirm that Mateo was his child.

Without knowing it, without ever suspecting it, my husband had paid a laboratory to confirm that he was the biological father of his own daughter.

The 99.9 percent match had never been between Arthur and Mateo.

It had been between Arthur and Maya — between a man and the very daughter he was, at that moment, in the process of abandoning in favor of a boy who shared none of his blood at all.