I still remember the first time I saw Ivy. She was dancing barefoot at a bonfire party just outside our college town, hair wild, laughter louder than the music. People gravitated to her like she had gravity in her bones.
And somehow, by some miracle, she picked me.
“Hey,” she said, brushing ash from her cheek as she sat beside me. “You always look like you’re overthinking something.”
I fell in love right then.
We married the next summer. I was 21, she was 20. Everyone said it was too soon, that Ivy wasn’t the “settling down” type. But when she smiled at me with those eyes full of fire and rebellion, I believed we could defy the odds. Love makes you stupid like that.
We were passionate, spontaneous, always broke, and never cared.
Life felt like a movie. And when Ivy found out she was pregnant, we were terrified — but in that “laughing while we cry” kind of way. Kyle was born on a rainy Tuesday. The sky outside the hospital window looked like it was leaking ink, and when the doctor placed him in my arms, I swear the whole world paused.
I looked over at Ivy, expecting to see that fire in her again, just in a new form — motherhood. But she stared at Kyle like she was watching the end of a movie she didn’t like.
“You okay?” I asked, gently.
She nodded too fast. “Yeah. Just tired.”
But there was something hollow in her voice — something missing.
At first, I chalked it up to postpartum exhaustion. Newborns are hard, and we were both barely keeping it together. But over time, that absence in her eyes didn’t fade. If anything, it deepened.
Then came the diagnosis. Kyle was 18 months old and wasn’t meeting his milestones. He couldn’t sit up properly, wouldn’t crawl. A flurry of appointments, scans, and specialists later, and we had a name for the storm: cerebral palsy.
I remember sitting in the hospital parking lot with Ivy, holding her hand. She was shaking.
“We’ll get through this,” I said.
She didn’t respond.
Over the next few weeks, I watched my wife dissolve in slow motion. Not into grief for our son, but into something darker. Regret and resentment. She stopped helping with the therapies and stopped looking at Kyle altogether.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” she whispered once, when she thought I was asleep.
That cut deep, but I stayed. I had to. Kyle needed me.
Then, one morning when Kyle was three, I woke up and something was off. Too quiet. Her perfume was gone from the air. I opened the closet and found it empty.
No note and no warning. Just… gone.
That was the day I became a single father. Warehouse job by day, caretaker by night. I stopped sleeping, stopped dreaming, but I never stopped loving Kyle.
Until one day, years later, a nurse casually mentioned his blood type, and my world began to unravel. “Interesting combination,” she said. “Type AB? That usually comes from A or AB parents.”
I blinked. “Wait…are you sure?”
“Positive.”
I smiled politely, but inside, something broke loose. Ivy and I were both Type O.
I tried to forget it, but I couldn’t. But that single, offhand comment lodged in my brain like a splinter. When the DNA kit arrived, I stared at the box like it was a ticking bomb.
It sat on the kitchen counter for three days. I kept walking past it, pretending I wasn’t scared out of my mind. But late one night, after Kyle had finally fallen asleep, I tore it open, swabbed my mouth, and sealed the envelope like I was burying something sacred.
Part of me hoped it would prove I was just being paranoid, that the nurse was wrong. That Google was wrong. That I was wrong.
But deep down, I already knew.
Two weeks later, the results hit my inbox.
Probability of paternity: 0.00%
I blinked, read it again and again.
“No,” I whispered, clicking through the breakdown. “No. No. No.”
The words blurred, and my hands went numb. It felt like the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. I stared at the screen, heart hammering, trying to make sense of it. I even emailed the lab, hoping they’d say there’d been a mix-up.
But there wasn’t.
Kyle wasn’t mine.
I sat there in the dark, the soft hum of the fridge the only sound. My son — my boy — wasn’t biologically mine. But even in that moment of heartbreak, I didn’t cry for me; I cried for him. For the truth he never asked for. For the betrayal Ivy buried and walked away from.
“How could you do this to him?” I whispered into the silence, talking to a ghost.
And then… something shifted. A memory. A face.
Greg.
My old supervisor. Mid-40s. Always had a toothpick in his mouth like he thought he was in a movie. Ivy hated coming to the warehouse except when he was around.
I remember now. The way his hand always lingered on her back just a second too long. The jokes that made her laugh a little too hard. The way she once said, “Greg’s actually really smart, you know,” after I mentioned how much of a jerk he was.
At the time, I thought nothing of it. I was young, trusting, and dumb. But now… now I saw it.
And Kyle, God help me, Kyle had his eyes. That same sharp, steely blue. That same pointed chin.
“No,” I muttered again. “Please, no.”
But the pieces were already falling into place. Ivy hadn’t just lied. She had burned everything down and left me holding the ashes.
And Greg? He went back to his life like nothing happened. Married, comfortable, and probably still walking around with that smug grin, completely unaware, or worse, fully aware of the secret he helped bury.
I opened my old contacts list and scrolled until I found his name.
My thumb hovered over the call button. “Come on,” I whispered. “Be a man. Say it. Ask.”
I pressed call.
The phone rang once. Twice. Then—
“Hello?” Same cocky, gruff voice. Still full of himself.
I took a breath that burned in my chest. “Greg,” I said, voice trembling with years of betrayal. “We need to talk.”
Pause.
“…Who is this?”
“It’s me. And it’s about Kyle.”
Silence.
And just like that, I knew he knew.
Greg strolled into the café like he was arriving at a business meeting — crisp shirt, sunglasses indoors, the same weird tilt to his jaw like he owned the world. He spotted me at the back table and gave a nod like we were old friends.
“Didn’t think I’d ever hear from you again,” he said, sliding into the seat across from me.
I didn’t answer right away. I just pulled the DNA report out of my bag, unfolded it slowly, and slid it across the table.
He glanced at it, smirked — but then I saw it. The twitch. The flicker. That tight shift behind the eyes. Not guilt. Not regret.
Panic.
“You knew,” I said quietly.
He leaned back, exhaling through his nose. “Yeah. I knew.”
There was a pause; heavy, charged, like the moment before a storm hits.
“You’re not even gonna deny it?”
He gave a lazy shrug. “Why bother?”
My hands clenched into fists under the table. “Why didn’t you come forward? Why didn’t you—?”
“I told Ivy I’d take care of them if she left you,” he interrupted, voice flat, cold. “But when the kid got sick… well, I wasn’t signing up for that.”
He said it like he was talking about a busted microwave. A child. My child.
I stood up so fast the chair scraped against the floor. For one white-hot second, I saw myself flipping the table, breaking his nose, dragging him across the café floor.
But then I thought of Kyle. His laugh. His wheelchair. The way he called me “Dad” with so much trust in his voice.
I sat back down. “You’re a coward,” I whispered. “And a disgrace.”
Greg scoffed. “Spare me the lecture. You raised him. Be grateful I left you something.”
That’s when I heard it — a sharp intake of breath.
A woman’s breath.
Greg’s wife was standing behind him, pale as chalk, her eyes glassy but hard.
“How long?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “How long have you been lying to me?”
Greg froze. “Sandra…listen, I can explain—”
“No,” she said, cutting him off with steel in her tone. “Don’t you dare try.”
She turned to me, and her expression shifted, softer, but still burning.
“You’re his father,” she said. “The only father that boy has ever had.”
“I…yeah,” I muttered. “I am.”
She looked back at Greg. “Get your things out of my house.”
“Sandra, wait—”
“Now.”
She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She just walked out, spine straight, eyes forward.
A week later, she called me. Said she wanted to help. She didn’t offer pity. She offered action. She covered Kyle’s physical therapy bills for nearly a year — quietly, no strings attached.
“I can’t undo what he did,” she told me. “But I can try to do some good.”
And Ivy? She came crawling back years later. Said she “missed her son.” Said she was “struggling.”
I opened the door, looked her in the eye, then closed it without a word.
Kyle knows everything now. I told him the truth when he was old enough to understand. He cried. I cried. And then he hugged me and said, “I’m glad you’re my dad.”
That’s all I ever needed to hear.
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