THE BABY AT THE BILLIONAIRE’S GATE: THE SECRET HIDDEN IN LILY’S NAME

“Where is it?” I asked.

“She mailed it.”

“To whom?”

“To Rose Mercer.”

The package had arrived at Rose’s apartment the morning after she was hospitalized. Because no one was there to receive it, the postal service returned it to a distribution center.

Daniel recovered it under police supervision.

He brought it to the estate that evening.

The package contained a flash drive, a folder of medical records, and a second sealed envelope.

The envelope was addressed to me.

The handwriting was not Rebecca’s.

It was Rose’s.

Meredith insisted that we open it with her present. Lily was upstairs with Mrs. Harris, helping choose a mobile for Eli’s crib.

Inside was a short letter.

Nathan,

If you are reading this, then the truth about the infant has already begun to emerge.

There is another truth I should have told you years ago, but I was afraid of what the clinic would do and uncertain what kind of man you had become.

Lily’s mother was my daughter, Caroline Mercer. Eight years ago, Caroline participated in what she believed was a properly authorized fertility program at Halcyon. She was told the biological father had consented to anonymous use of his preserved genetic material.

After Lily was born, the clinic insisted all records had been destroyed.

They were not.

Patient file A-17 does not belong to the newborn.

It belongs to Lily.

I stopped reading.

The room seemed to recede around me.

Meredith slowly lowered herself into a chair.

Daniel opened the folder with careful hands. At the top was a Halcyon embryo transfer record dated eight years earlier. The genetic source identification number matched the number on my original storage agreement.

Beneath it was a laboratory report prepared from a sample Rose had legally preserved during one of Lily’s childhood medical evaluations. The report had not been completed until that morning, after investigators obtained authorization from Lily’s court-appointed advocate to compare it with my confirmed DNA profile.

Daniel turned to the final page.

His face changed.

“What does it say?” I asked, though part of me already knew.

He placed the report in front of me.

Probability of biological paternity: 99.98 percent.

Footsteps sounded on the staircase.

Lily entered the room carrying a paper moon she had made for Eli’s mobile.

She stopped when she saw our faces.

“What happened?” she asked.