I ordered a DNA test.
I didn’t do it for Ben. I want to be really clear about that. Ben had already said he didn’t need it, and I believed him. Dr. Hale’s word was enough for him. The photograph of Copper Tom was enough for him. His own conscience was enough for him.
It wasn’t for him.
It was for her.
I sat in the rocking chair one afternoon, watching Evelyn sleep in the bassinet with her arms thrown up over her head like she’d just won a race, and I thought about her at sixteen. At twenty-five. I thought about her one day finding out, from some cousin or some aunt or some overheard conversation, that her own father had once looked at her in a hospital room and said she wasn’t his.
I wanted a piece of paper that said, in black and white, that he was wrong. That she had always belonged exactly where she was. That nobody, ever, would be able to question who she was or where she came from.
