A DNA result works backward through facts, but it cannot work backward through character, and what the last two days had shown me about Nicolas’s character was not a thing any laboratory could reverse.

I understood, kneeling in his begging and his tears, that I had been asking the wrong question all along.

The question had never been is Leander his son. Of course Leander was his son.

The question was what kind of man accuses his exhausted wife of adultery over the color of a newborn’s hair, and threatens to put her and the baby on the street, hours after she’s given birth? And that question the paper had also answered, though not in the way Nicolas thought.

It had answered it the moment he decided the accusation was more plausible than his own family history.

The pity I felt was real.