Chapter 3 - THE REARVIEW MIRRORI didn't go home. Home was a sprawling four-bedroom house paid for by the Bennett family trust. Home was where Daniel’s clothes hung in the closet and Margaret’s spare key sat in the kitchen drawer.

I drove until my hands stopped trembling on the steering wheel. I drove until the sprawling estates of the Bennett neighborhood faded into the anonymous, neon-lit strip malls of the highway.

In the backseat, Sophie had fallen asleep. Her thumb rested near her mouth, her breath hitching every few minutes from the residual tears. The pink princess dress was stained with dirt and rust.

I pulled into the parking lot of a cheap motel off Interstate 95. The fluorescent vacancy sign buzzed against the twilight sky.

Once we were inside the room, I laid Sophie on the bed, pulling the thin polyester blanket over her. I locked the deadbolt. I slid the chain across the door.

Then I sat on the edge of the second bed and pulled the DNA test from my purse.

I stared at the numbers. 99.9%. But my eyes caught on something else. A secondary column on the second page. A routine blood-typing profile the lab had run to establish baseline genetic markers.

Daniel Bennett: Blood Type AB Negative.

I frowned. I knew Daniel was AB Negative. It was a rare blood type. He used to brag about the Red Cross calling him constantly for donations.

But I also knew Arthur Bennett’s blood type. Arthur, Daniel’s late father. The man who had built the Bennett fortune. He had suffered a massive hemorrhage during surgery three years ago. I had been at the hospital. I remembered Margaret screaming at the nurses to find more O-Negative blood.

Arthur was O-Negative. Margaret was O-Positive.

I stared at the paper. The motel room suddenly felt as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of it.

I was no geneticist, but I remembered high school biology. Two parents with Type O blood can only produce a child with Type O blood. It is scientifically impossible for them to have a child with Type AB blood.

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Margaret’s terror on the porch flashed in my mind. She wasn't afraid the DNA test would prove her right. She was afraid of what would happen when it proved her wrong.

Daniel wasn’t Arthur Bennett’s son.