Chapter 6
Marcus Vance stood frozen beside the hospital bed, his outstretched hand trembling slightly before he slowly pulled it back to his side. The buoyant energy that had carried him through the hospital doors just moments earlier had completely evaporated, replaced by a suffocating, prickly panic. He looked from his mother’s grim, averted gaze to Chloe, who looked so small and broken beneath the stark hospital linens. "Somebody talk to me," Marcus said, his voice rising a fraction, carrying the desperate edge of a man standing on the edge of a crumbling cliff. He reached out and snatched the multi-page laboratory report from the tray table, his eyes darting frantically across the lines of clinical data and probability percentages. The silence in the room became absolute, a heavy vacuum that seemed to suck all the air out of his lungs.
The numbers didn't require a medical degree to understand. The name at the top read Chloe Vance, and the genetic markers listed beneath the paternal comparison column yielded a definitive, unmistakable negative. Marcus’s knees buckled slightly, and he had to grab the metal frame of the bed to keep upright. The world he had carefully built over the past three years—the wedding vows exchanged under a sunlit arbor, the shared apartment filled with half-assembled cribs, the quiet pride of impending fatherhood—shattered into fine, crystalline dust in his hands. "This... this is a joke," Marcus whispered, his voice cracking painfully on the vowels. He looked down at the newborn resting peacefully against Chloe’s chest, completely oblivious to the emotional tempest tearing its world apart at the seams. "Tell me this is some kind of sick joke, Chloe."
Chloe couldn't look him in the eye. She stared down at the pink blanket, her lips trembling uncontrollably as fresh tears spilled over her lashes and soaked into the cotton fabric. "I'm so sorry, Marcus," she choked out, the admission dropping into the space between them like a heavy iron weight. It wasn't a denial; it was a surrender. The confession stripped away every remaining illusion, leaving the raw, bleeding truth exposed under the harsh fluorescent lights. Eleanor stepped forward, wrapping a tentative, protective arm around her son’s shaking shoulders, her own anger momentarily eclipsed by the sheer devastation etched across his face. Marcus dropped the papers back onto the table, his hands curling into tight fists at his sides as the realization of betrayal settled deep into his bones.
