Chapter 10 — THE NEWBORN SCREEN
I am not a scientist.
I teach piano to eleven children and I run a choir at a church that pays me four hundred dollars a month.
So on the twelfth of November I did what anybody does, which is spend six hours reading things on the internet I did not understand, and then on the thirteenth I called the genetic counsellor back and asked her to explain it to me as if I were an idiot.
She was extremely kind about it.
"Autosomal dominant means you only need one copy. If a parent has it, each child has a fifty percent chance. If neither parent has it, the child does not have it, except in a new mutation, which happens but is rare."
"How rare?"
"For this variant? I've never seen one. It's a stable old family variant, it runs in lines."
"So if my daughter has it, her father had it."
"Almost certainly."
"And if her father had it, his father had it."
There was a pause.
"Or his mother," she said. "One of the two."
Margot Halloway had a full blood count in that same folder, from 2020, from a pre-operative work-up before a knee.
She did not have it either.
I sat on the floor of a one-room apartment on Bell Street with a folder open in front of me and a four-pound baby asleep four feet away, and I did the arithmetic that anybody would do, and then I did it again to make sure I had not done it wrong.
Adam Halloway carried a rare inherited haemoglobin variant.
Neither of the people listed as his parents carried it.
I want to record what I felt, honestly, because it was not what I would have predicted.
It was not shock about Adam.
Adam was thirty-five and dead and had been the kindest person I have ever been in a room with, and nothing about a blood protein changed one thing about him.
What I felt was cold, and specific, and it was this:
Margot Halloway looked at an ultrasound photograph on the fourteenth of October and said that thing is not a Halloway, and ninety seconds later she put her hand on my shoulder.
She had not said it as an insult.
She had said it as a fact.
She knew.
And if she knew, then she had known for thirty-five years, and she had sat in a conference room in Hartford six days earlier and listened to a lawyer read out a clause about lineal descendants of the settlor, and the thing that had gone out of her face was not surprise.
It was arithmetic.
Because if Adam was not Gerald Halloway's son, then Adam had never been a lineal descendant.
And neither was my daughter.
And clause eleven, the clause that was about to take everything away from her, would not apply to a child who was not in the bloodline at all.
Margot Halloway had one way out of losing that house.
She had to prove that her own son was not her husband's.
I called Harlan Voss at nine the next morning.
He listened to me for six minutes without interrupting, which for a man who bills in six-minute increments is a form of generosity.
Then he said: "Mrs. Thorne, I want you to stop talking to me for a moment and listen very carefully."
"Okay."
"Do not test your daughter against anyone. Do not consent to any test. Do not sign a release for that screening panel. If Mr. Ozick's office contacts you about medical records, you send them to me and you do not answer."
"Why?"
"Because you have just told me that the only person in the world with a motive to prove your daughter isn't a Halloway is the woman who threw you off a balcony, and she doesn't know yet that a laboratory has already done half her work for her."