“Mrs. Reynolds,” he said, his voice heavy. “Your husband… he didn’t make it to the car.”
My heart constricted. Despite how he had just treated me, ten years of marriage didn’t vanish in an instant. “Is he… is he dead?”
“No,” the doctor shook his head. “But he is critical. He’s in the ICU. He suffered massive acute heart failure.”
I was stunned. Mark prided himself on his health. He ran every morning; he followed a strict keto diet. How was this possible?
The doctor pulled a chair up next to me, his expression complicated. “We ran emergency blood work on him. And we found the cause. It’s a rare genetic disorder: Familial Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, the aggressive variant. His extreme rage… it triggered a systemic failure.”
He paused, his eyes shifting to the crib where my son was now sleeping.
“And Sarah,” the doctor continued, speaking slowly. “Because of the premature birth, we ran a comprehensive genetic panel on the baby the moment he was born. I compared the results.”
I held my breath. “What results?”
“The baby,” the doctor pointed to my son, “carries the exact same rare genetic marker. He is a perfect genetic copy of Mark.”
The room spun. I let out a laugh. A dry, twisted, painful laugh. Mark had roared that the child wasn’t his. He had smashed my phone and destroyed my reputation based on a blind belief in his own calculations. And now, the very blood running through this child’s veins was the undeniable proof of his stupidity.
“So you mean… he has a genetic disease, and my son has it too?” I asked, a new wave of worry hitting me.
