“Belief isn’t proof,” my mother said gently.
She wasn’t wrong, and I hated that she wasn’t wrong, hated that even my own certainty in my wife wasn’t going to be enough to quiet an entire extended family’s whispered speculation.
So Corinne and I made the decision together, sitting at our kitchen table one exhausted evening with both boys finally asleep upstairs, to get a full paternity test done properly, for both twins, through a certified lab instead of relying on anyone’s assumptions.
“I want this for us,” Corinne told me. “Not because I need to prove anything to you specifically. Because I need it to exist, on paper, for every single person who’s going to keep asking questions with their eyebrows instead of their actual mouths.”
The results came back twelve days later. I remember opening that email standing in our kitchen, Corinne beside me, both of us holding our breath.
Ninety-nine point nine nine percent probability of paternity. For both boys.
