Chapter 165: CLXV

Isabell’POV

The results had been sitting in my email for four hours before I opened them. I received the notification at nine in the morning.

A small ping from the private laboratory I had selected myself, a facility with no pack connection, no supernatural affiliation, staffed entirely by human scientists who processed DNA samples with the clinical neutrality of people who dealt only in biological fact.

I had seen the notification arrive. I had looked at my phone, seen the sender's name, and put the phone face down on the kitchen counter that had been four hours ago.

Levi had not pushed; he had moved through the morning beside me with the particular quality he had when he was managing his own concern and choosing not to add it to mine. He made breakfast.

He answered work calls in the next room with the door mostly closed. He brought me coffee at ten and put it beside me without comment when I was sitting on the couch staring at nothing specifically.

At one in the afternoon I went to the bathroom cabinet.

The anxiety medication had been prescribed eight months ago by a GP who had noted my elevated cortisol levels and attributed them to workplace stress, which at the time had been both accurate and an enormous understatement of what was actually happening in my life.

I had filled the prescription and used it three times and put it away. I took one tablet now and swallowed it with water from the tap and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror for a moment.

The woman looking back at me was someone I had believed I knew completely. The face I had woken up to every day of my remembered life. The face in my mother's photographs from childhood, from school, from every stage of a life I had understood to be simply mine.

My face was also the face in a portrait hanging in Xavier's sitting room. Painted in clothing from a different era. Surrounded by a landscape I had never been to in this lifetime.

I looked at my left wrist and the small dark mark below my thumb then I went back to the kitchen and picked up my phone.

I opened the email.

The document loaded slowly, which was the laboratory's standard format, a full report with technical data preceding the summary result. I scrolled past the technical data.

My hands were steady, which surprised me, because the rest of me was not steady at all. I found the summary section, I read it once then I read it again.

‘Probability of first-degree maternal relationship: 99.998%’

‘Conclusion: the tested individuals share a maternal biological relationship consistent with mother and child.’

The phone was in my hands and then it was not, and the sound it made hitting the kitchen floor was very distant because everything had gone to a specific kind of quiet that arrived when the thing you had been both dreading and somehow already knowing was confirmed in writing by a laboratory with no reason to lie.

Aria was my daughter.

I had a daughter. A six-year-old daughter with uneven pigtails and a rabbit named George who sang a song in the dark and put her hand on my face to check if I was real.

I was on the kitchen floor.

I did not remember deciding to sit down but I was on the floor with my back against the cabinet and my knees pulled up and the phone somewhere near my right hand and I was shaking in the specific way that was not cold, the full-body tremor of a system that had received more than it could absorb.

"Isabellla." Levi came through the kitchen doorway fast. He must have heard the phone hit the floor.

He crossed to me in three steps and crouched down, both hands on my face, his eyes going over me quickly the way they did when he was assessing whether something was physically wrong.

"I'm not hurt," I said. My voice came out in pieces.

"I know," he said.

"I can see that look at me."

I looked at him. "Breathe," he said.

"Start there."

I breathed one breath, deliberately, filling my lungs the way I told patients to do when I needed them to slow down. Then another.

His hands stayed on my face.

"The results," I said.

"I know," he said again.

"She's mine," I said.

"The test ninety-nine point nine percent she is biologically mine."

Levi's expression did not change in the way of surprise he had been expecting this, I realized.

Had probably known since the moment he sat in Xavier's sitting room and listened to everything Xavier said about the mark, about the song, about the things only a person who had shared years with me could have known.

He had known before the test.

"I have a daughter," I said, and the words were completely different and said out loud with the test result behind them than they had been as a hypothesis. They had weight now. Biological, confirmed, irreversible weight.

"Yes," Levi said.

"She has been alive for six years," I said.

"She has been dreaming of me for six years. She has been growing up and I haven't…I wasn't-"

"You couldn't know," Levi said.

"She was four months old," I said. My voice broke on the last word and I let it go.

"She was four months old and I left her I left her and she has been growing up without her mother and she asks where I have been and I don't have an answer because I don't remember-"