“I know you think this is a gift, but how could you?” Elena held the white envelope between two fingers, as if it might burn her hand. “On our wedding anniversary, Nikolai! Our fifteenth anniversary!”
Nikolai stood by the window, looking out at the courtyard flooded with July sunlight. His broad shoulders tensed.
“You have to understand me, Lena. I had the right to know.”
Around them were the traces of a festive dinner: unfinished champagne, the remains of a cake with fifteen candles, and a bouquet of lilies in a tall vase. Their country house, which they had bought five years earlier, suddenly seemed strange and cold, despite the heat outside.
“Know what? That Andrey isn’t your son?” Elena threw the envelope onto the table. “This is some kind of monstrous mistake. I have never cheated on you, do you hear me? Never!”
Nikolai turned to her. Anger and pain battled in his eyes.
“Then explain these results to me. Explain why they say the probability of my paternity is less than one percent!”
The front door slammed. Vera, their fourteen-year-old daughter, appeared in the doorway. She was tall like her father, with the same deep-set gray eyes.
“What’s going on here?” she asked, looking from her father to her mother. “Are you fighting? On your anniversary?”
Elena quickly grabbed the envelope from the table.
“Nothing, Vera. We’re just discussing… work matters.”
“On a day off?” Vera narrowed her eyes, showing the sharpness she had inherited from her father. “Fine. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t. I’m going to Katya’s. We were planning to go to the movies.”
When their daughter left, Elena sank onto a chair.
“Where is Andrey?”
“At the Pavlovs’. They picked him up from football practice, and he’s staying with them overnight,” Nikolai said, taking the bottle and pouring himself more champagne. “Funny, isn’t it? We’re celebrating fifteen years of marriage, and I’ve just found out that I’ve been raising someone else’s child for ten years.”
“He is not someone else’s child!” Elena jumped up. “How can you say that? You are his father. You held him in your arms when he was a newborn. You taught him how to ride a bicycle. You…”
“I thought he was mine!” Nikolai slammed the glass down so hard that champagne splashed onto the tablecloth. “And now I don’t know what to think. Who is he, Lena? Whose child is he?”
“Mine and yours. Our son. There was some kind of mistake with this test.”
“I checked three times, Lena. Three times! I didn’t want to believe the first result.”
Elena felt as if the ground were slipping out from under her feet.
“When did you start doubting me? Why did you even take this test?”
Nikolai was silent for a moment, then sighed heavily.
“Viktor.”
“Viktor? Your former colleague? What does he have to do with this?”
“Two weeks ago, we accidentally ran into each other at a hardware store. We started talking. He asked about you, about the children. And then… then he said something that made me think.”
Elena felt her hands go cold.
“What exactly?”
“He hinted that you two had had an affair. That you… that you and he…” Nikolai could not finish the sentence.
“What?!” Elena sprang up. “Me and Viktor? Have you lost your mind? I couldn’t stand him! He always tried to set you up at work. You said so yourself!”
“I know,” Nikolai ran a hand through his hair. “But then I started remembering things… Andrey doesn’t look like me at all. Not like anyone in my family. And the timing roughly matches the period when I was working on the project in Kazan and often went away for a week at a time…”
“I can’t believe you don’t trust me,” Elena said, sinking back into the chair. “Fifteen years of marriage, and you believe Viktor instead of me.”
“I wanted to believe you! That’s why I took the test — to prove to myself that Viktor was lying. But the results…” Nikolai nodded toward the envelope. “The results say otherwise.”
A heavy silence hung in the room.
“What now?” Elena finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Nikolai said, picking up his bag. “I need time to think. I’ll stay at Igor’s for a couple of days.”
Elena wanted to object, but the words stuck in her throat. She silently watched her husband leave the house they had built together. When the door closed, she lowered her head into her hands and burst into tears.
“I don’t understand,” Igor, Nikolai’s younger brother, said as he handed him a cup of coffee. “Why did you even take that test?”
They were sitting in the kitchen of Igor’s apartment — small but cozy. Nikolai had not slept all night, and the circles under his eyes made that obvious.
“You didn’t see the way Viktor looked at me when he said it. With such… certainty. And besides, you know yourself that Andrey doesn’t look like me.”
“He looks like Elena,” Igor shrugged. “So what? My Dimka looks more like Yulia than me too.”
“But the test results…”
“Are you sure those results are accurate? Who did the analysis?”
Nikolai pulled a crumpled business card from his pocket.
“GenLab. A private laboratory, but it has good reviews. I checked.”
Igor took the card and turned it over in his hands.
“And what are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” Nikolai rubbed his face with his palms. “It feels like my world has collapsed.”
“Did you talk to Elena? What does she say?”
“She says she never cheated on me. That it’s a mistake.”
“Do you believe her?”
Nikolai looked up at his brother.
“I believed her for fifteen years. And now… I don’t know.”
Elena was sitting in the director’s office at the MedTest laboratory. She had barely slept, but she looked composed and determined.
“I need the results as quickly as possible,” she said, handing over the test tubes with the samples. “I’m willing to pay extra for urgency.”
The director, a plump woman with glasses, nodded.
“We can do it in three days. But I must warn you, a DNA paternity test is a serious procedure. If you doubt the results of another laboratory…”
“I am more than certain that there was a mistake there,” Elena said firmly. “My husband is my son’s father. I want to prove it.”
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After leaving the laboratory, Elena called her friend Marina.
“I need your help. You worked at the city hospital ten years ago, didn’t you? Do you remember a nurse named Irina from the maternity ward?”
Vera found her mother at the computer. Elena was quickly searching for something online and making notes in a notebook.
“Mom, what’s going on? Where is Dad? He isn’t answering my messages.”
Elena flinched and closed the laptop.
“Dad went to Uncle Igor’s. We have… a small disagreement.”
“What kind of disagreement?” Vera crossed her arms. “What did you fight about?”
Elena sighed. Vera was too smart to be fooled with simple excuses.
“Your father… doubts that he is Andrey’s biological father.”
Vera froze, her eyes widening.
“What? But how… why?”
“He took a DNA test. The results showed that genetically he is not Andrey’s father. But it’s a mistake, Vera. I’m sure it’s a mistake.”
“Did you… did you cheat on Dad?” Vera’s voice trembled.
“No! Never!” Elena grabbed her daughter’s hands. “I swear to you, I have never cheated on your father. I love him. I always have.”
Vera pulled her hands away.
“Then where did Andrey come from?” there was challenge in her voice. “DNA doesn’t lie, Mom.”
“Tests can be wrong. Laboratories can make mistakes. People can manipulate results.”
“What are you talking about?”
Elena opened the notebook.
“I think the results were falsified. Or there was a mix-up at the maternity hospital. Or…”
“Now you’re inventing some insane theories instead of admitting the truth!” Vera exclaimed. “You deceived all of us! Poor Dad! Poor Andrey!”
“Vera, please,” Elena reached out to her daughter, but Vera recoiled.
“Don’t touch me! I… I don’t want to talk to you!”
Vera ran out of the room, slamming the door loudly. Elena sank into the chair, feeling tears run down her face again. Her whole world was falling apart before her eyes.
Marina brought Elena to a small café on the outskirts of the city.
“She’ll be here in five minutes,” Marina said, checking her phone. “I told her I wanted to meet with a former colleague. I didn’t mention you.”
“Thank you,” Elena said, nervously twisting a napkin in her hands. “Are you sure it’s the same Irina?”
“Absolutely. Irina Savelyeva. She worked in the maternity hospital when you gave birth to Andrey. Then she quit quickly and left town. She only came back a couple of years ago.”
The café door opened, and a woman in her forties entered, with short hair and a guarded look. When she saw Elena, she froze.
“What is this, Marina? Why did you trick me?”
“Please, Irina,” Elena stood up. “I just need to ask you a few questions.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” Irina said, turning toward the exit.
“I know you dated Nikolai before me!” Elena blurted out. “And I know you worked at the maternity hospital when my son was born.”
Irina slowly turned around.
“So what?”
“Was there… a mix-up with the babies? Or…” Elena could not force herself to say the word “substitution.”
Irina smiled bitterly.
“You think I switched your child out of revenge? Seriously?”
“I don’t know what to think!” Elena cried. “A DNA test shows that my husband is not my son’s father. I never cheated on Nikolai. How else can this be explained?”
Irina walked over to the table and sat down.
“Listen, I won’t pretend I was thrilled when Nikolai left me for you. Yes, I was hurt. Yes, I worked at the maternity hospital when you gave birth. But I’m not crazy enough to switch babies!”
“Then what happened?” Elena threw up her hands in despair.
Irina looked at her carefully.
“What exactly did the test show? That Nikolai isn’t the father? Or that the child isn’t yours either?”
“Only that Nikolai isn’t the father.”
“And where was the test done?”
“At GenLab.”
Irina thought for a moment.
“You know, this is a strange coincidence, but my niece works at GenLab. Alisa Savelyeva. She processes results.”
Elena and Marina exchanged glances.
“And could she… change the results?” Marina asked cautiously.
“I didn’t say that,” Irina quickly replied. “But Alisa… she is very attached to me. And she knows the story with Nikolai.”
Tamara Petrovna, Nikolai’s grandmother, was waiting for him in her small apartment. Despite being eighty years old, she still had a clear mind and a strong character.
“Sit down, my grandson,” she said, pointing to a chair. “Igor told me everything. What nonsense have you gotten yourself into?”
Nikolai sat down.
“Grandma, this isn’t nonsense. I have the test results…”
“Tests!” the old woman snorted. “When was the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror? Or at your grandfather?”
She got up and walked over to an old chest of drawers, pulling out a worn photo album.
“Here, look.”
She opened the album to a yellowed photograph. A boy of about ten looked out from it, amazingly similar to Andrey.
“Who… who is this?” Nikolai asked.
“Your grandfather, Vladimir. My husband, may he rest in peace. This photo was taken in 1953.”
Nikolai took the photograph with trembling hands.
“But… this is Andrey! How?”
“In our family, Kolya, genes play strange tricks. They skip generations. You look like your father, while Igor takes after me. And Andryusha is the spitting image of Volodya.”
“But the test…”
“The test, the test!” his grandmother waved her hand. “Do you know your grandfather had a rare blood type? And you have the same one. And so does Andryusha.”
“That doesn’t prove anything, Grandma.”
“And what does prove anything? That you’re ready to destroy your family because of some piece of paper? That proves your stupidity, that’s what!”
Elena sat in the director’s office at MedTest and stared at the results of the second test. They confirmed the results of the first one — Nikolai was not Andrey’s biological father.
“Is it possible for two different tests to be wrong?” she asked in a trembling voice.
The director shook her head.
“The probability is very low. But… there are certain genetic anomalies that can affect the results. Very rare ones.”
“What kind?”
“For example, chimerism. That is when a person has cells with different genetic material. Or certain mutations that affect the standard markers used in tests.”
Elena remembered Tamara Petrovna’s words about the rare blood type.
“Where can we do a deeper analysis? One that would take these anomalies into account?”
“At the state genetic laboratory. But it is expensive and takes a long time.”
“I don’t care. I want to know the truth.”
Viktor did not expect to see Nikolai at the door of his apartment.
“Kolya? What are you…”
He did not get to finish. Nikolai grabbed him by the collar and pinned him against the wall.
“What the hell did you tell me about Elena? Why did you lie?”
“I… I didn’t lie,” Viktor tried to free himself. “Let go of me!”
Nikolai released him, and Viktor slid down the wall.
“Your niece works at GenLab, right?” Nikolai asked. “Alisa Savelyeva.”
Viktor turned pale.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, you understand perfectly well. You knew I would take the test after your hints. And you knew where I would take it, because you recommended that laboratory yourself. ‘A reliable place,’ wasn’t that what you said?”
“Nikolai, you’re talking nonsense. I don’t know any Alisa…”
“Stop lying!” Nikolai pulled out his phone and showed him a photo. “This is you and Alisa at a GenLab corporate party. A photo from their website.”
Viktor covered his face with his hands.
“Why, Viktor?” Nikolai asked quietly. “Why did you do this?”
“You got the promotion that should have been mine,” Viktor replied dully. “You were always management’s favorite. Then you opened your own company and became so successful… And I have nothing. No career, no family.”
“And you decided to destroy my family out of envy?”
“I just wanted you to feel as miserable as I do.”
Elena and Nikolai sat in the waiting room of the state genetic laboratory. Andrey was sitting on a chair between them, swinging his legs and playing on his phone. He did not understand why they were all giving some kind of samples, but he was happy to miss school.
“Did you talk to Viktor?” Elena asked quietly.
Nikolai nodded.
“He confessed to everything. He wanted revenge on me for old grudges.”
“And his niece?”
“She confessed too. She falsified the results at his request.”
“And the second test? At MedTest?”
Nikolai shook his head.
“That’s the strange part. They claim their results are accurate. And they have no connection to Viktor.”
“The Sokolov family?” a doctor said, stepping into the waiting room with a folder in his hands. “Please come into the office.”
In the office, the doctor, an elderly man with an attentive gaze, laid several sheets with charts and tables in front of them.
“I have unusual news for you,” he said. “From the point of view of a standard analysis, Nikolai Sokolov is indeed not the biological father of Andrey Sokolov.”
Elena went pale, and Nikolai clenched his fists.
“But,” the doctor continued, “we conducted an expanded analysis and found something interesting. Nikolai, you have a rare genetic feature — a mutation in one of the key markers used in standard paternity testing.”
“What does that mean?” Nikolai asked.
“It means that a standard test will show a false negative result. With a deeper analysis, we can see that the genetic material matches. You are definitely Andrey’s father.”
Elena covered her face with her hands, unable to hold back tears of relief.
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“Is it a rare mutation?” Nikolai asked, remembering his grandmother’s words.
“Very rare. It occurs in approximately one person out of ten thousand. And it is inherited. Andrey has this mutation too.”
That evening, the whole family gathered for dinner. Vera, cautious at first, gradually softened when she saw her parents holding hands again and smiling at each other.
“So it was all because of some mutation?” she asked.
“And because of one man’s envy,” Nikolai nodded. “Viktor knew about my doubts regarding Andrey’s appearance and decided to use them.”
“But how did he know about the mutation?” Vera asked in surprise.
“He didn’t,” Elena answered. “He simply asked his niece to falsify the results of the first test. And the second test showed the same result because of a mutation no one knew about.”
Andrey, who was eagerly eating pizza, lifted his head.
“What mutation are you talking about? Am I a mutant, like from X-Men?”
Everyone laughed, and the tension of the last few days began to fade.
“No, son,” Nikolai said, ruffling his hair. “You and I just have one rare genetic feature. It makes us… special.”
“Cool!” Andrey brightened. “What superpowers do we have?”
“Our main superpower is being a family,” Elena smiled. “No matter what.”
Later, when the children had gone to bed, Nikolai and Elena were left alone in the kitchen.
“Forgive me,” Nikolai said quietly. “I should have believed you, not some tests.”
“And I should have understood your doubts,” Elena replied. “Andrey really doesn’t look like you outwardly.”
“But he is the spitting image of my grandfather,” Nikolai smiled. “Grandma was right.”
Elena leaned against her husband.
“You know, that was the worst anniversary gift ever.”
“I promise, next time it will only be flowers and jewelry.”
“And no envelopes with test results?”
“No envelopes,” Nikolai confirmed, kissing his wife.
The full moon shone through the window, filling the kitchen with soft light. The family storm had passed, leaving behind the understanding of how important trust is, and how fragile it can be. And perhaps that understanding was the most valuable gift of all on their fifteenth anniversary.
