Chapter 4: The Swab
The housekeeper’s name was Inés. She’d worked for the Halloways for thirty-one years. She led me through a kitchen the size of my parents’ house and into a library full of morning light.
Charles Halloway was waiting by the window. White hair, a white beard, a navy cardigan over a light-blue shirt. He looked older than on TV. Tired in a way that went all the way down.
And he had green eyes. Exactly like mine.
He didn’t say hello. He held out his hand, palm up.
I put the bracelet in it.
He looked at it for a very long time. Then he took a folded slip of paper out of his cardigan pocket, old and soft as cloth, and held it next to the bracelet. A hospital ID number in faded blue pen. They matched.
“My wife wrote that down in the nursery the morning after Eleanor was born,” he said. His voice cracked. “She’s kept it in her wallet ever since.”
I showed him the photo. Then I turned my head and lifted my hair.
He made a sound I’ll never forget.
But he was a careful man. Twenty-six years of false hope will do that. “I need to be certain,” he said. “For her sake. For Helen’s.”
“So do I,” I said. “Swab me. Right here. Watch them do it.”
He had his doctor at the house in forty minutes. The swab was taken in that library, with Charles, Inés and his attorney watching, and sealed and signed across the seal. A second kit sat on the table.
“Eleanor.” Charles turned toward the door. “Would you come in here, please?”
Kayla walked in wearing a white designer blazer over silk pajamas that weren’t hers, sunglasses pushed up on her head. She saw me and stopped dead.
“Daddy. What is she doing here?”
“A second test,” Charles said pleasantly. “Supervised this time. Just a formality.”
“I already did a test.”
“You gave us a hairbrush,” the attorney said. “This time, Dr. Okafor will take the sample from your cheek. Please open your mouth.”
For a second I thought she’d run. Then she opened her mouth, and the doctor swabbed it, and her eyes found mine over his shoulder with pure hatred.
The lab was Charles’s own. It took nineteen hours.
I spent them in a guest room with a view of the ocean, not sleeping. Inés brought me tea at midnight and sat on the end of the bed, and told me that Helen had kept Eleanor’s nursery exactly as it was for eleven years, until a therapist begged her to close the door.
We were all in the library when the results came: Charles, Helen, who had flown home from New York overnight and hadn’t stopped looking at me, the attorney, Kayla. And a San Diego police detective Charles had invited without telling anyone.
Mara Dempsey: probability of parentage, Charles and Helen Halloway: 99.98%.
Kayla Dempsey: excluded. 0%.
Helen Halloway put both hands over her mouth.
Charles turned to Kayla. His voice was very quiet. “You’re not my daughter. She is.”
Kayla burst into tears. Real ones, this time. “It wasn’t my idea! It was my mom’s, she said Mara would never use it right, she said…”
“Your mother,” the detective said, “and your aunt Darlene are going to have a lot of questions to answer.”
Then Inés appeared in the doorway, looking shaken.
“Mr. Halloway, there’s a man at the front gate. He says his name is Gary Dempsey. He says he’s driven all night. He says it can’t wait.”
They let him in. Gary stood in that library in his old flannel shirt with his cap in his hands, looking at the floor, and then, for the first time in twenty-six years, he looked straight at me.
“Darlene didn’t sell you, Mara,” he said. “Lorraine took you herself.”
