My Husband Had Two Children With His Secretary and Blamed Me for Being Childless, Then His Doctor Asked One Question That Wiped the Smile From His Face

What I needed was Martin.

Ingrid called him that afternoon and asked him to come to Winnetka alone. When he arrived, unshaven, in yesterday’s shirt, with dark circles under his eyes, she sat him down in the same chair I’d sat in and told him everything.

I wasn’t in the room. I waited in the kitchen with Ingrid’s housekeeper, a kind older woman named Rosa who made me a cup of tea I didn’t drink. I heard Martin through the wall, quietly at first, then louder, and then a sound I’d never heard him make in nine years of marriage.

He was crying.

When Ingrid finally came to get me, Martin was sitting with the photograph of Adrian and Clara in his hands, staring at it.

He looked up at me when I walked in. The rage was gone. All that was left was a stunned, broken emptiness.

“My brother,” he said hoarsely.

“Yes.”

“The whole time. Clara. The babies. The money.” He looked down at the photo. “He sat at my table at Thanksgiving. He held Theo at the baptism. He stood next to me at the gala when I held up Lucy and said, ‘My legacy keeps growing.’” He laughed, a horrible, wet sound. “He must have been laughing at me the entire time.”

“I think he was counting,” I said quietly. “Like I was.”

Martin put the photograph down.

“You could have destroyed me, Evie,” he said. “At the hospital. At the gala. Any time in the last five years. You could have walked into a board meeting with that folder and taken everything. Why didn’t you?”

I sat down across from him.

“Because I wanted to be sure,” I said. “If I’d come at you with the medical records and the affair, you’d have said I was a jealous, bitter wife. Your family would’ve said it. The board would have said it. Clara would have cried on cue, and everyone would’ve believed her.” I paused. “And I wasn’t just watching you, Martin. I was watching the money. I knew someone was stealing from your company. I just didn’t know who.”

“So you let me make a fool of myself in front of six hundred people.”

“You made a fool of yourself in front of six hundred people,” I said. “I just didn’t stop you.”

He flinched. Then, slowly, he nodded.

“What happens now?” he asked.

“Now you’re going to agree to a DNA test,” I said. “And so is Adrian, whether he likes it or not.”

Margaret filed it as part of the divorce.

I filed for dissolution of marriage in the Circuit Court of Lake County on a Tuesday morning. On the same day, Margaret filed a petition asking the court to declare that the forfeiture clause in the Voss Marital Trust had been triggered, and to confirm me as sole beneficiary and successor trustee.

In the same filing, she asked the court to order genetic testing of Theo and Lucy Hayes. Martin’s lawyer had already sent Clara a demand letter asserting that Martin’s name had been placed on both birth certificates under false pretenses, which made paternity directly relevant to the case. Under the Illinois Parentage Act, the court could order genetic testing of the children and of any man who might be the biological father.

Clara fought it. Her lawyer, a man from a downtown firm who’d clearly been paid well, argued that Martin had “voluntarily acknowledged paternity” by signing both birth certificates, and that it was too late to challenge.

The judge, a careful woman named Judge Helen Strasser, listened to forty minutes of argument. Then she read Dr. Ellison’s sworn declaration, the medical records showing Martin’s permanent infertility going back five years, and Howard Lindqvist’s report on the Lakeshore money.

“Counsel,” she said to Clara’s lawyer, “your client’s position is that a man who is medically incapable of fathering children should be presumed the father of two children because he signed a form at the hospital without knowing his own medical history. Meanwhile, the man in this photograph is pushing a stroller with a hospital bracelet that names him as the father.” She took off her glasses. “I’m ordering genetic testing. All three adults. Both children. The lab is to report directly to the court.”

Adrian Voss tried not to show up for his test. He hired his own lawyer and filed a motion arguing that he wasn’t a party to our divorce.

Judge Strasser issued an order compelling him to appear under the Parentage Act, with a warning that refusal would let the court draw an adverse inference. That meant she could assume the result would have been exactly what everyone suspected.

He showed up at the lab on a Friday morning in sunglasses, and wouldn’t look at anyone.

The results came back twelve days later.

The probability that Martin Voss was the biological father of Theo Hayes was zero percent, and the same for Lucy Hayes.

The probability that Adrian Voss was the father of Theo was 99.998 percent, and of Lucy, 99.997 percent.