Bella had transferred two weeks earlier. Her parents, Daniel and Susan, dropped her off every morning at 7:45.
The next day, we waited. At 7:45, Daniel and Susan arrived hand in hand with Bella between them. Ordinary, warm, bewildered when John asked for a moment.
Lily and Bella eyed each other from ten feet away, identical curls and suspicious fascination.
Daniel exhaled slowly. “That is genuinely uncanny,” he said. Then quickly added, “Kids look alike sometimes.”
But the way Susan’s hand tightened on Bella’s shoulder told me she’d thought the same thing—and was already pushing it down.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Ava was three years old. She was gone. That’s what I had forced myself to believe. But grief doesn’t believe in logic.
“I need a DNA test,” I said into the dark.
John was quiet for so long I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then: “Grace…”
“I know what you’re going to say. That I’m spiraling. That this is grief. That I’ll hurt myself more. But I’ll hurt more not knowing. And you know that too.”
He stared at the ceiling. Finally: “If it comes back negative, you have to let her go. Really let her go. Can you promise me that?”
I reached for his hand. “Yes, I can.”
Asking Daniel and Susan was the hardest conversation of my life. Daniel’s confusion turned to anger in seconds, and I didn’t blame him. I was a stranger questioning the identity of his child.
But John explained quietly—about Ava’s fever, the hospital, the blank space where a goodbye should have been.
