My mother set her napkin down and asked Sharon where she even got the DNA test in the first place.
Nobody answered.
My husband looked completely lost. Lily had crawled into his lap because everybody at the table was yelling except my mom, who stayed weirdly calm through the whole thing.
Then my mother looked straight at Sharon and said, “Did you use the same lab your husband used back in 1996?”
The room went dead silent.
I had never even heard about a DNA test from 1996.
Sharon started stammering that it had nothing to do with this, but my mother just kept talking like she was finally tired of holding something in. Apparently when my husband was a baby, Sharon secretly tested him because she thought her husband had cheated on her during a separation. The test came back saying he wasn’t the father.
But Sharon never told anybody.
Not her husband. Not her son.
Nobody.
My father-in-law slowly stood up from the table and asked her if that was true. Sharon just sat there crying with mascara running down her face while Lily kept asking why Grandma was upset.
So now the woman who tried to prove my daughter “wasn’t family” accidentally exposed that her own husband might not be my husband’s biological father either.
And honestly, I still don’t know if Sharon actually hated me all these years or if she was terrified somebody else would do to her son what she did to her own family.