The color drained from his face.

I told him I’d heard them talking about Mateo. Panic flickered across his expression.

“Wait… you understood them?” he asked.

“I always have,” I said. “Every comment. Every insult. Every judgment.”

He sat down heavily.

Then he confessed.

“They did a DNA test.”

The words barely registered.

“My parents weren’t sure Mateo was mine,” he said quietly.

I had to sit down as he explained how, during their visit, they’d taken hair from Mateo’s brush—and his—and sent it to a lab without our knowledge.

“They told me at Thanksgiving,” he said. “The results confirmed Mateo is my son.”

I laughed, sharp and bitter. “How generous of them—to confirm that the child I gave birth to is actually yours.”

Luis admitted they had doubted me because Mateo looked like me—light hair, blue eyes. They said they were “protecting” him.

“And you let me sit at their table knowing this?” I asked.

He said they begged him not to tell me. That the truth would only hurt me.

“And you agreed,” I said.