[Adrian’s POV]

The testing kit arrives three days later.

It’s smaller than I expected—a nondescript box that looks like it could contain anything, giving no indication of the weight it carries. The brown cardboard is unremarkable, the shipping label mundane, but the moment Sophie sets it on the kitchen table, the air in the room changes. It becomes charged, electric, heavy with the magnitude of what this innocent-looking package represents. The three of us stare at it like it might explode.

“It’s just a box,” Cassian says, but his voice lacks its usual certainty. There’s a tremor beneath the words, a crack in the composure he wears like armor. Even he—the most analytical, the most measured of us—can’t quite pretend this is routine.

“It’s Pandora’s box,” I counter. “Once we open it, we can’t un-know whatever’s inside.”

The mythology feels apt. We’re standing at the edge of knowledge that will reshape everything, and there’s no going back once we step forward. My heart pounds against my ribs, each beat a reminder that this moment is real, that we’re actually doing this.

“We already don’t know,” Sophie points out. “This just changes our not-knowing into knowing. Which is what we decided we wanted.”

She’s being logical, practical, all the things I usually am and can’t seem to access right now. Her voice is steady, her hands calm as they rest on the table near the box, but I can see the tension in her shoulders, the way she’s holding herself together through sheer determination. My hands are trembling slightly, a fact I’m trying to hide by keeping them in my pockets. The tremor feels like betrayal—my body refusing to perform the calm I desperately want to project.

“Okay,” I say, forcing myself to breathe. The air feels thick, difficult to draw in, as if the room itself is holding its breath along with us. “Let’s just… do it. Get it over with.”

Sophie opens the box and spreads the contents across the table. Swabs, vials, instruction sheets, prepaid envelopes for mailing. Everything neatly organized, clinically efficient. The sterility of it feels wrong somehow—this profound moment of our family’s history reduced to cotton swabs and plastic tubes. I stare at the components, trying to reconcile their ordinariness with the extraordinary power they hold.

“Who’s first?” she asks.

“I’ll go,” Cassian says, reaching for one of the swabs. His hand is steady—of course it is—but I notice the way his jaw tightens, the almost imperceptible flutter of his pulse at his throat. He reads the instructions carefully—of course he does—then swabs the inside of his cheek with methodical precision. The sample goes into its labeled vial, sealed and set aside.

My turn.

The swab feels strange against my cheek, cotton scraping against skin that suddenly seems too sensitive. Every nerve ending fires with awareness, as if my body knows the significance of what’s happening even as my mind tries to reduce it to mechanics. I focus on the procedure—the thirty seconds of swabbing, the careful transfer to the vial, the sealing of the cap—rather than thinking about what this sample might reveal. My hands shake as I seal the vial, and I have to try twice before the cap clicks into place.

Maggie’s sample is the hardest.

She’s sleeping in her bassinet, peaceful and unaware that her tiny cheek is about to provide an answer that’s been haunting her parents for months. Looking at her—so small, so perfect, so completely oblivious to the turmoil swirling around her—I feel my throat tighten with emotion. She didn’t ask for any of this. She didn’t ask to be born into uncertainty, to be the subject of questions and doubts planted by a woman who’s never even met her.

Sophie lifts her gently, supporting her head with practiced care, and I feel a surge of protective love so strong it makes my eyes burn. Tears prick at the corners of my vision, and I blink them back furiously. This child—whatever DNA she carries—is mine. She’s been mine since the moment I felt her kick through Sophie’s belly, since the moment I held her in the delivery room, since every 3 a.m. feeding and every lullaby sung in the dark.

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