The man who died when I was seventeen.
I stood so quickly the chair fell behind me.
“That’s impossible.”
“Maya—”
“My father died twenty years before we did IVF.”
“Yes.”
“How could his genetic material be at Greenhaven?”
Rachel’s voice softened.
“Because before his cancer treatment, he froze sperm.”
I pressed my hand over my mouth.
“And somehow…”
“The clinic used the wrong sample during fertilization.”
I thought I might vomit.
Then Rachel continued quickly.
“But the embryo was identified as genetically abnormal and never transferred.
It remained stored because Greenhaven’s records were such a mess nobody knew who legally controlled it.”
I stared at the wall.
The full horror landed slowly.
Had that embryo ever been transferred to me, the child would have been conceived from
my egg and my biological father’s sperm.
Another catastrophic laboratory error.
A mistake hidden inside the mistake.
The clinic had nearly created a tragedy no one involved could have imagined.
