Chapter 4 - The Shadow of the Donor
The drive back home felt like traversing a graveyard. The revelation had shattered the foundation of our lives. Leo wasn't just my son; he was the subject of a medical mystery that stretched back to an illegal fertility clinic, a place that had exploited couples like us to conduct prohibited experiments on genetic predispositions.
"We have to find him," I whispered, the silence of the house finally becoming unbearable as we stood in the foyer.
"The donor?" Mark asked, his voice hollow. "The clinic was liquidated. The records were burned. Even the court cases were sealed."
"But Evelyn knew," I insisted. "She knew enough to get tested. She knew enough to act like a monster so we would keep our distance, so we wouldn't look closer. If she knew, she had to have had access to the files."
I began pacing the living room, my mind racing. Evelyn’s rejection, her cruelty, the "don't call me Grandma"—it was all a firewall. She had been protecting herself, or perhaps protecting us from the truth that we were raising a child who, according to the doctors, would lose his memory and his personality by the time he reached his seventh birthday if we didn't find the specific donor's medical history to treat the mutation.
That night, while Mark finally collapsed from exhaustion on the sofa, I retreated to the attic. I pulled down the old boxes of family photos—the ones Evelyn had given us when we first married. If she had been hiding this for four years, she had likely kept a physical paper trail somewhere.
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I found a small, locked leather journal tucked behind a framed portrait of Mark’s late father. I pried the lock open with a kitchen knife. Inside were not just bank records or old letters, but a handwritten list of names—a list of donors from the defunct clinic. And right at the top, circled in red ink, was a name that made me drop the journal to the floor.
It was a name I recognized from the town’s local newspaper archives—a man who had been reported missing five years ago. And under his photo, there was a single, terrifying note in Evelyn's handwriting: He is still alive, and he is the only one who can save the boy.
