Chapter 5 - CELESTE'S CONFESSION
Celeste asked to speak beside Noah's incubator because she believed no one would raise their voice there.
She was wrong.
Ava had awakened despite the doctors' expectation that she would sleep for hours. Pale and weak, she sat in a wheelchair between Gabriel and Lenora, staring through the glass at her son.
Celeste stopped three steps away.
“Ava, I am sorry.”
Ava did not look at her. “That sentence is too small.”
“I know.”
“Then use larger truth.”
Celeste pressed both palms over her abdomen. “Blythe told me my pregnancy would secure my future. She arranged the clinic, the donor records, everything.”
Gabriel's expression hardened. “Donor records?”
Celeste nodded. “I could not conceive naturally after the surgery. Blythe said she found embryos from a private program. She made me sign confidentiality agreements.”
Ava finally turned. “Whose embryos?”
“I thought they were anonymous.”
Mara, standing near the doorway, opened a file on her tablet. “The clinic used by both of you has no licensed embryo program.”
Celeste began to cry.
Three weeks before Ava's baby shower, she had found a receipt hidden in Blythe's desk. It referenced a laboratory transfer under Ava's patient number. Celeste confronted her mother. Blythe claimed it was a clerical shortcut and warned that asking questions could invalidate Celeste's claim as the mother.
“I was afraid,” Celeste said.
“You were willing to let me be afraid instead,” Ava replied.
The words landed without cruelty, which made them harder to escape.
Mara explained what the documents suggested. During Ava and Gabriel's fertility testing two years earlier, the clinic had stored genetic material with their consent. Ava conceived naturally months later, but the samples were never destroyed. Someone may have used them without authorization.
Celeste's child could be genetically Ava and Gabriel's.
Gabriel stepped back from the glass.
Ava's hand tightened on the wheelchair arm.
Celeste whispered, “I didn't know until I saw the receipt.”
“And after you saw it?” Ava asked.
“I let Blythe convince me it was impossible.”
“You came to my shower knowing it might be true.”
“Yes.”
The neonatal monitor sounded softly. Noah moved beneath his blanket.
Ava watched him for a long moment. “You will submit to independent testing. You will surrender every clinic document. You will not leave the state.”
Celeste looked startled by the authority in her voice.
Ava continued. “And you will never again tell me you were powerless. You had choices. You chose comfort until violence made comfort impossible.”
Lenora lowered her eyes, recognizing more than Celeste's guilt in the sentence.
The police arrested Blythe before noon on charges related to aggravated assault and evidence tampering. She was denied immediate release after prosecutors disclosed the hospital attack.
Yet Blythe used her one call not to contact her attorney.
She called the private clinic.
By the time investigators arrived, the records room was burning.
Firefighters saved part of the building, but the cryogenic storage wing had been emptied hours earlier. Security footage showed an unmarked van leaving before dawn.
Mara traced the van to a shell company registered under the name of Gabriel's dead father.
That evening, Ava received a sealed envelope at the hospital. No return address. Inside was a photograph of Blythe holding two newborn infants twenty-eight years earlier.
One infant was Gabriel.
The other had no name on the blanket.
Celeste's confession did not end with the clinic. She admitted that Blythe had trained her since childhood to compete with Ava. When Ava won a school prize, Blythe told Celeste that praise was a limited resource. When Celeste became ill, Blythe said Ava had stolen the family's attention. Every tenderness became evidence in a trial only Blythe understood.
Ava remembered years of unexplained cruelty between them.
“You were not born hating me,” she said.
“No,” Celeste answered. “But I practiced.”
The sisters sat without speaking.
Celeste did not ask to be forgiven. She asked for a list of every document investigators needed and signed releases for all medical records. She also agreed to independent legal representation for the unborn child, ensuring that no adult's interests could erase hers.
It was the first decision Celeste made that Blythe had not prepared for her.
Before leaving, she placed the photograph of the two infants on Ava's table.
“I don't know who I am in this picture,” she said.
Ava touched the image. “Neither do I. But we can stop letting Blythe answer.”
May you like
On the back, someone had written:
THE FIRST CHILD WAS NEVER YOURS.
