He slid the scanner to the left, pausing. He tapped a few keys on the console.
He moved the wand again, pressing slightly harder.
A deep, severe crease etched itself between the doctor’s silver eyebrows.
Adrian, ever the predator tuned to shifts in atmospheric pressure, noticed the change in demeanor immediately. His spine stiffened. “Is there a problem with the heartbeat?”
Dr. Reynolds didn’t respond. His eyes darted rapidly between the glowing screen and the digital patient chart resting on his tablet. Slowly, he removed the wand, wiped the gel away with a towel, and reached for the intercom button mounted on the wall.
“Janice,” the doctor’s voice was unnervingly flat. “Please have the Director of Medical Administration step into Room Three immediately.”
Chloe’s skin turned the color of old parchment. She gripped the edge of the exam table, her knuckles stark white. “Administration? Dr. Reynolds, why do you need administration?”
Adrian stepped forward, his protective stance morphing into an aggressive, demanding posture. “Doctor. What the hell is going on here?”
Dr. Reynolds turned to face them, his expression utterly devoid of bedside manner. The air in the room instantly dropped ten degrees.
“Mr. Castillo, I need to verify a critical piece of data before we proceed. According to the intake charts filled out this morning, conception occurred approximately nine weeks ago. Is that correct?”
Chloe nodded frantically, her chest heaving. “Yes! Nine weeks. Exactly nine weeks.”
The doctor looked past Adrian, locking eyes directly with Chloe. His voice was a surgical blade.
“Ms. Chloe. The fetal measurements do not corroborate that timeline. They don’t even approach it.”
Adrian let out a forced, scoffing laugh—the sound of a man trying to reject reality. “Well, look, these early estimates can be a little off, right? Biology isn’t an exact science.”
“It is exact enough, Mr. Castillo,” Reynolds countered without blinking. “And it is certainly not off to this extreme degree.”
The heavy oak door swung open. A woman in a sharp navy-blue suit—the clinic director—stepped inside, flanked by a secondary nurse. Outside the open door, drawn by the sudden influx of staff, Margaret and Vanessa had abandoned their armchairs and drifted close enough to the threshold to catch the echo of the conversation.
“Based on skeletal ossification and cranial development,” Dr. Reynolds continued, his words falling like anvils, “this pregnancy is not nine weeks along. It is definitively approaching sixteen weeks.”
A profound, suffocating silence crashed over the room, so heavy it threatened to crack the floorboards.
Adrian blinked. Once. Twice. His brain furiously trying to compute the math. Nine weeks ago was their triumphant romantic getaway to the Maldives. Sixteen weeks ago…
Sixteen weeks ago, he was still sleeping in my bed. Sixteen weeks ago, Chloe was allegedly still with her ex-fiancé.
As the mathematical reality slammed into him, Adrian physically recoiled. He dropped Chloe’s hand as if her skin had suddenly turned to scalding acid.
“That’s… that’s medically impossible,” Adrian choked out.
Chloe sat frozen, her eyes wide with animal terror, unable to formulate a single syllable.
“You told me,” Adrian whispered, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, contained rage, “that you stopped taking your pills after the Miami trip.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, a single tear cutting through her perfect makeup. “Adrian, please… just let me explain…”
“You looked me in the face and swore that baby was mine!” he roared, the sound bouncing off the tiled walls.
Margaret, unable to restrain herself any longer, shoved the door fully open, her face twisted in confusion and horror. “Adrian? What exactly is this man saying?”
Dr. Reynolds let out a slow, tired sigh. “Ma’am, it means the biological timeline presented to us today absolutely invalidates the father’s presumed paternity.”
Vanessa gasped, clapping a hand over her mouth. Her eyes darted to the woman she had treated like a sister just moments before. “Chloe…?”
The flawless, glamorous mistress suddenly looked utterly broken. She shrank back against the exam table, small, fragile, and utterly cornered by a colossal, desperate lie that had just collapsed under the crushing weight of its own arrogance.
“I was so scared!” Chloe suddenly wailed, her pristine facade shattering into ugly, desperate sobs. “Adrian kept promising me he was going to file the papers on Elena! He kept promising, but he never did! Month after month, excuses! I thought… I thought if there was a permanent tie, a baby, he would finally leave her!”
Adrian took another step backward, his face contorted in pure, unadulterated disgust. “Who is the father, Chloe?”
Chloe buried her face in her trembling hands, her shoulders heaving violently.
“I said, who is the father?!”
“I don’t know!” she shrieked, the confession echoing out into the waiting room.
Margaret staggered backward, her face drained of all color, looking as though she had been physically struck. “What in God’s name do you mean, you don’t know?”
“It happened right before the Miami trip!” Chloe cried, hyperventilating. “I had just officially split up with Tyler, and I went out, and then Adrian came back into town… I panicked! I thought I could make the timeline work. I thought we could just be a family!”
