All Chapters of Daddy by deception - My ex husband's fake heirs: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

The information came in pieces, the way it always did now — through people who still assumed he wanted updates on the woman he had left.A colleague mentioned seeing her at a riverside restaurant. Not alone. Not performing loneliness. Laughing at something the man across from her had said, a little girl with them who moved between the adults with easy familiarity. “She looked well,” the colleague added, the same phrase that had unsettled Gregory weeks earlier. This time it landed harder.Then a photograph, sent without malice by a mutual acquaintance who thought he was being helpful: Cathrene at an outdoor event, the same man beside her, the child between them holding both their hands. The caption was bland. The image was not. She was not looking at the camera. She was looking at the man, and the expression on her face was one Gregory could not remember receiving from her in the final years of their marriage — unguarded, present, quietly sure.He enlarged the photo until the screen bl

Comparison became the lens through which everything passed.Gregory no longer moved through his days in a straight line. Each moment in the mansion bent backward toward the plaza, toward the photograph, toward the laugh he had not earned in years. The house would present him with a scene, and his mind would answer with its opposite across the city, until living itself felt like being trapped between two columns of a ledger he could no longer balance.Morning in the mansion: Caleb answering in monosyllables, Josiah watching him with the careful eyes of a child who had already said too much, Dorcas measuring out calm in a kitchen that had grown polite with tension. Morning, imagined, across the city: Cathrene in a smaller space that belonged to her, a child who leaned against her arm without strategy, a man who adjusted a napkin as if care were not a performance.Evening in the mansion: the study door closed, the private account open, the numbers tighter than the month before, the pro

Morning did not soften the decision.Gregory woke at his desk with a stiff neck and the same hard clarity he had taken to bed with him. The fear was still present. The possible consequences still stood in a line that could wreck every remaining structure of his household. None of that moved the central fact: he needed to know the truth. Not a managed version. Not a comforting ambiguity. The truth in a form that could survive a child’s outburst, a woman’s hesitation, and his own desperate ability to invent softer readings.He showered in the study bathroom, dressed, and went downstairs before the boys were fully awake. Dorcas was already in the kitchen, Hope against her shoulder, eyes shadowed from a sleepless night. She looked at him as if measuring whether the previous evening’s ultimatum had survived daylight.“It has,” he said, answering the unspoken question. “I’m making the appointments.”“Gregory—”“I’m not opening it for debate. You can come with them or not. You can prepare th

The first irregularity arrived before the full DNA report.It came in the form of a preliminary clinical note — not the formal paternity conclusion, only a routine compatibility and marker summary that a careful technician had flagged for the requesting parent. Gregory opened the encrypted message in the study at 6:42 a.m., still in yesterday’s shirt, the house around him only beginning to stir.Blood types.His own: O negative. Dorcas: A positive. Caleb: B positive. Josiah: B positive.Gregory stared at the screen until the letters stopped being letters and became a problem in basic biology he had learned years ago and never expected to need again.O and A could not produce B.The rule was clean. Unforgiving. The kind of fact that did not care about mansion walls, school fees, bedtime stories, or the word *Daddy* shouted from a doorway. Two B-positive children could not belong, biologically, to an O-negative man and an A-positive woman. Not through ordinary inheritance. Not thr

The message arrived at 9:17 a.m. on a Monday.Gregory was in the study with the door locked, the folder open, the blood type printout already soft at the edges from being handled too many times. His phone lit with the clinic’s encrypted notification. For a second he did not touch it. The room held the kind of silence that comes before a verdict. Then he entered the access code and opened the document.**Paternity Test Report — Preliminary Issuance** **Child: Caleb Naliaka** **Alleged Father: Gregory Thornton** **Combined Paternity Index: 0** **Probability of Paternity: 0.00%**The zero did not blur. It sat in the center of the screen with bureaucratic calm, framed by columns of markers and alleles that meant nothing to him except in aggregate. Not low probability. Not inconclusive. Zero. The science had not softened the landing.He scrolled further.**Child: Josiah Naliaka** **Alleged Father: Gregory Thornton** **Combined Paternity Index: 0** **Probability of Paternity: