PART 2: THE DOCTOR WHO WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE FOUND

The room went completely silent.

Grant stared at the doctor through the phone.

“Say it again.”

“We’re certain,” the doctor replied. “Dr. Adrian Vale is Maddie’s biological father.”

Rachel looked at Grant.

But Grant wasn’t looking at her.

He was staring at the old pH๏τograph.

His mother.

Adrian Vale.

Together.

Thirty years earlier.

“That can’t be true,” Grant whispered.

The doctor continued.

“There’s another problem. Our records show that Dr. Vale was connected to the fertility clinic during the same period.”

Rachel’s stomach тιԍнтened.

“What kind of connection?”

“He was one of the physicians responsible for handling donor material.”

Grant suddenly remembered something.

His mother had always hated Adrian Vale.

At least, that was what she had told him.

She had warned Grant never to speak his name.

Yet the pH๏τograph suggested they had once been close.

Grant immediately searched through his mother’s old belongings.

Inside a locked box, he found dozens of documents.

One caught his attention.

It was an old fertility-clinic consent form.

Grant’s mother’s signature appeared at the bottom.

But beneath it was another signature.

Dr. Adrian Vale.

Rachel stared at the page.

“Why would your mother have anything to do with him?”

Grant couldn’t answer.

Then he found an old letter.

His hands began trembling as he read it.

“If they ever discover what Adrian did, they will come looking for the children.”

Rachel’s face went pale.

“The children?”

Grant kept reading.

The letter revealed that Adrian had secretly subsтιтuted genetic material for numerous patients decades earlier.

Maddie wasn’t the only child.

The twenty-plus half-siblings were evidence of something far larger.

But then Grant noticed one final line.

“Grant must never know that he was one of them.”

He slowly lowered the letter.

Rachel stared at him.

“What does that mean?”

Grant looked toward her.

For the first time, he understood why Adrian’s name had appeared in his own medical history years earlier.

Why his mother had insisted on controlling every detail of his fertility treatment.

And why Grant had never been able to conceive naturally.

His infertility hadn’t been an accident.

Someone had known about it long before he did.

Then Rachel’s phone buzzed.

A message from an unknown number appeared:

STOP TESTING THE DNA.

A second message followed.

MADDIE ISN’T THE ONLY SECRET YOU’RE ABOUT TO UNCOVER.

Then a pH๏τograph arrived.

It showed Adrian Vale standing outside the fertility clinic.

Beside him was Grant’s mother.

And between them stood a much younger Grant.

On the back of the pH๏τograph were four words:

“He was the first.”