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My stomach turns. “You’re saying this doesn’t matter?”

“I’m saying it matters differently than you think it does.”

“Oh my God.” I push a hand through my hair and start pacing before I can stop myself. The room suddenly feels too small. “You can’t possibly expect me to hear this and think it’s normal.”

“I don’t expect you to think it’s normal.”

“What do you expect?”

“That you listen.”

I stop and turn back to him. “I have been listening since the day I met you.”

“Then listen now.” His tone doesn’t rise. It doesn’t need to. He says it the way he says everything important: as if volume is for people who don’t expect to be obeyed.

Usually I hate that about him. Right now, I hate that some part of me still pauses when he does it.

He stands then, finally. Not quickly. Not aggressively. Just enough to shift the room again. “I chose you,” he says.

I laugh in disbelief. “That is not helping.”

“I’m not trying to help. I’m trying to be clear.”

He comes around the desk, stopping a few feet away. “I chose you because you were intelligent, healthy, capable, and because I believed you could do this.”

“That was before.”

“No,” he says. “That was the beginning.”

I stare at him.

“The test result changes the story you’ve been telling yourself,” he continues. “It doesn’t change mine.”

That is such an Alester sentence that for one wild second I want to throw the folder at his head.

Instead I say, “Your story?”

“Yes.”

I actually put my hands on my hips because if I don’t, I might start screaming. “Please, go ahead. I’d love to hear the story where this is reasonable.”

His gaze stays on mine. “I want the child,” he says again. “I intended to raise the child. I am prepared to raise the child. None of that changes because of an unexpected result.”

I just look at him. He looks back at me for so long that I start to feel the silence physically.

Then he says, “I know it’s Dalton’s.”

For a second, I honestly think I’ve misheard him.

I stare at him. He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t soften it. He doesn’t give me room to pretend he meant something else.

My voice comes out thin. “What?”

Alester’s expression stays exactly the same. Calm. Controlled. Almost bored, if I didn’t know better. “I know the child is Dalton’s,” he says again.

The room goes cold.

Not literally. The air is the same, the light is the same, the same polished furniture is still sitting around us like it belongs in a catalog for emotionally unavailable men with inherited wealth. But something in me goes cold.