Betrayed Broken Husband Becomes a Billionaire Daddy

9: Tough Tricks

Stacy's penthouse sat thirty floors above the city, all white marble and glass, the kind of place built to be photographed rather than lived in. Donald Mccallister found her standing at the window when he arrived, a glass of wine untouched on the counter behind her, her reflection ghosted over the skyline.

"He wants everything documented." Donald Mccallister set his folder down on the counter, loosening his tie. "Chain of custody forms, witnesses, photographs of the sample. I've never seen a man that careful about a DNA swab in my life."

"He's a surgeon." Stacy didn't turn around. "Careful is the whole job."

"Careful is a problem for us." Donald Mccallister rubbed the back of his neck. "The plan we discussed needs room to move, Stacy. Room to adjust a result quietly, without twelve signatures and time stamped photos standing in the way."

Stacy finally turned, and the calm mask she wore for cameras had slipped somewhere on the way up the elevator. What was left underneath looked tired, and colder than tired.

"Then find the room." Her voice stayed level, but there was an edge under it now, something brittle. "I don't care how tight he's made it. This result has to come back the way it needs to come back."

"The way it needs to come back." Donald Mccallister repeated it slowly, watching her. "Say what you actually mean, Stacy."

"You know exactly what I mean." She crossed the room and picked up the wine glass, turning it in her fingers without drinking from it. "The paperwork needs to say Chloe is his daughter. That's all. I'm not asking you to do anything complicated."

"You're asking me to falsify a paternity test." Donald Mccallister kept his voice low, glancing toward the hallway out of habit, though the penthouse was empty except for the two of them. "That's not complicated, Stacy, that's criminal. If anyone traces it back, we're not talking about a bad headline anymore. We're talking about fraud charges. Evidence tampering. My license, gone. Maybe worse for you."

"And if we don't do it?" Stacy set the glass down hard enough that wine slid up the side and nearly spilled over. "Three labs already say Chloe isn't his. If a fourth one confirms it, with all his little signatures and photographs proving nobody tampered with anything, then what? He walks into that divorce with rock solid proof I cheated on him. My lawyers can't spin that story into anything but exactly what it is."

Her voice climbed, cracking at the edges in a way the public had never once heard from her. "Everything I've built. Every endorsement, every role, every ounce of goodwill I've spent twenty years collecting, it all turns into a punchline the second that story breaks. America's sweetheart, caught lying to her husband for sixteen years about whose baby she was carrying. Do you have any idea what that does to a career like mine?"

"I have some idea, yes." Donald Mccallister's jaw tightened. "I've spent a decade building the version of you the public gets to see."

"Then help me protect her." Stacy's eyes were bright, whether with anger or something closer to fear, Donald Mccallister genuinely couldn't tell anymore. "I'm not asking you to hurt anyone. I'm asking you to make sure a piece of paper says what it needs to say."

"That's the thing about evidence, Stacy." Donald Mccallister's voice stayed quiet, almost gentle, the way a man spoke when he was trying to talk someone down off a ledge. "It doesn't care what it needs to say. It only cares what it actually says. The second we touch that file, we've created a second problem sitting right on top of the first one. And problems like that don't stay buried. Someone always finds them eventually."

"Then make sure no one finds it." Stacy's tone flattened into something almost businesslike, all the emotion suddenly tucked back behind a wall. "That's what I pay you for, Donald. Not for lectures on what's dangerous. I already know it's dangerous. Losing everything I've worked for is dangerous too. At least this way I get to choose which danger I'm walking into."

Donald Mccallister studied her for a long moment, the woman he'd represented for a decade, the woman half the country still believed could do no wrong. He had known her long enough to recognize when a conversation was actually already over, when the only thing left to decide was how much of himself he was willing to spend carrying out an order he'd already lost the argument against.

"I'll see what can be arranged." He said it quietly, already reaching for his phone, already hating himself a little for how easily the words came out.

"Quietly, Donald." Stacy picked the wine glass back up, finally taking a sip, some of the earlier brittleness smoothing back over into her usual composed shine. "I don't want to hear about it until it's done."

He left the penthouse twenty minutes later with the weight of the conversation sitting in his chest like something swallowed wrong. Out in the parking garage, sitting behind the wheel of his own car, he stared at nothing for a while before finally starting the engine.

His phone buzzed against the passenger seat just as he pulled out onto the street.

An unknown number. A single message, short and strange.

I work at Ridgeline. We need to talk in person. Not over the phone.