Chapter 4 - The Delivered Insult
Two days later, on the morning of December twenty-eighth, an unmarked delivery van idled in front of our suburban home. The courier walked briskly up the driveway, carrying a padded white envelope marked with fluorescent legal seals and priority tracking stamps.
I signed the electronic pad, my heart sinking into my stomach. When I ripped open the top seam, a commercially packaged DNA collection kit tumbled onto the kitchen island alongside an official letter written on Gerald’s personal corporate letterhead.
The instructions were explicit, bordering on grotesque:
*Samuel: Enclosed are four sterile cheek swabs. Administer them to Fiona under neutral adult supervision. Send two swabs to the lab on the pre-paid slip and hand-deliver the duplicates to my home address. We have scheduled an appointment with our family arbitrator for January fifth. Compliance is mandatory if you wish to remain recognized as an heir to the Holloway lineage.*
I stared at the cotton swabs in disbelief. “They sent a home kit to our porch like a summons.”
Samuel walked over, his eyes blazing with a fury I had never seen in our ten years of marriage. He didn’t scream or throw the box. Instead, he picked up Gerald’s typed letter and ripped it in half, then into quarters, letting the confetti flutter into the trash bin.
“They think this is leverage,” Samuel said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “They assume I’m trembling at the thought of being written out of Gerald’s will.”
“Samuel, what if they show up here?” I asked, thinking of Fiona upstairs in her bedroom. “What if they confront her again?”
“They won’t have the chance,” Samuel replied, pulling his car keys from the bowl by the door. “Arthur Vance called twenty minutes ago. Agnes wants a DNA test done. But not through their mail-order kit, and certainly not on Janice’s terms.”
I looked at him, startled. “Agnes wants one?”
May you like
“Yes,” Samuel nodded grimly. “Because in order to make Fiona’s irrevocable trust permanently ironclad against future lawsuits from Janice and Gerald, Arthur needs certified, court-admissible genetic forensic profiling filed with the probate division. We are going to a certified medical laboratory this afternoon.”
***
