Chapter 7: The DNA Test
The burner phone sitting on Andrew’s mahogany desk vibrated violently, jarring him from a heavy, restless trance. He snatched it up before the second ring. It was Marcus Vance.
"Tell me," Andrew demanded, his voice rough.
"I pulled the hospital records for your maid, just like you asked," Vance’s gravelly voice crackled over the line. He didn't sound cynical anymore; he sounded deeply unsettled. "Andrew... she wasn't lying about the amnesia. She was admitted to Seattle County Charity Hospital five years ago as a Jane Doe. Severe retrograde dissociative amnesia. But that’s not the part that’s going to keep you awake."
Andrew gripped the edge of his desk. "What is it, Marcus?"
"The intake date," Vance replied heavily. "She was brought into the emergency room by a passing trucker at 3:15 AM on November 14th. She was found wandering in the rain on Route 9, roughly ten miles south of the embankment where Sarah's car went over. Her intake sheet lists smoke inhalation, mild thermal burns on her left shoulder, and blunt force trauma to the cranium."
The air in the study vanished. Andrew couldn't breathe. The phone slipped slightly in his sweating hand. November 14th. The exact night his world had ended.
"Andrew? You still there?"
"The coroner’s report from the crash..." Andrew managed to choke out.
"I’m still waiting on a judge to unseal the original dental records," Vance cautioned. "Listen to me, Andy. This is entirely circumstantial. A coincidence, even a massive one, is not proof. You cannot go confronting this woman or Victoria based on intake dates. If you’re wrong, you’ll destroy what’s left of your mind."
"I need physical proof," Andrew whispered, his eyes locking onto the door of his study. "I'll get it." He hung up the phone.
Down in the basement, the mid-morning shift was in full swing. Sarah knew the schedule by heart—not because she had learned it over the last three months as Elena, but because she had designed the estate's staff rotations herself seven years ago. She knew the head housekeeper did inventory at ten o'clock, meaning the servant’s corridor would be completely empty.
But it wasn't empty.
Andrew moved silently down the concrete steps, a master key gripped tightly in his hand. He felt a sickening wave of guilt invading the private quarters of an employee, but the desperate, roaring hope in his chest drowned it out.
He slipped the key into the lock of Elena’s door and turned it. The small room was painfully barren. A perfectly made narrow bed, a single unadorned uniform hanging on the back of the door, and a small, scuffed sink. There were no photographs, no books, no knick-knacks. It was the room of a ghost.
Andrew approached the sink. Resting next to a bar of cheap soap was a plastic hairbrush. His hands shook as he picked it up. Woven into the plastic bristles were several long, dark strands of hair. He carefully extracted five strands, ensuring the tiny white follicles at the roots were still intact. He pulled a small, sterile plastic evidence bag from his jacket pocket—provided by Vance—and sealed the hair inside.
If this is you, Sarah, he thought, staring at the empty room, I swear to God, I will tear the world apart to make it right.
Upstairs, Sarah was struggling to survive her own mind.
She had been assigned to dust the grand library in the west wing. Every step she took was an emotional landmine. She ran her cloth over a mahogany end table and vividly remembered buying it at an antique auction with Andrew on their honeymoon. She looked at the massive leather armchair and saw the ghost of herself sitting there, heavily pregnant with Max, reading aloud to a toddler-aged Leo.
The memories were so sharp, so colorful, they made the drab reality of her maid's uniform feel like a suffocating straitjacket. She wanted to scream. She wanted to sprint through the halls, kick open the doors of Victoria’s lavish suite, and physically drag the woman out of her house.
But Victoria’s threat from the laundry room echoed in her ears: You are a nobody. I will have you locked in a psychiatric ward.
Sarah knew that bursting into Andrew’s study and claiming to be his dead wife without absolute proof would look like the exact psychotic break Victoria was trying to frame her for. She had no ID, no money, and no allies except two seven-year-old boys. She had to bide her time. She had to be Elena, the terrified maid, until she could secure the leverage she needed.
As she carried a basket of discarded linens toward the back staircase, she heard heavy footsteps approaching.
Andrew rounded the corner. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her.
Sarah instantly lowered her chin, averting her eyes in the submissive posture of the hired help. "Excuse me, Mr. Sterling," she murmured softly, stepping aside to press her back against the wallpaper so he could pass.
Andrew didn't move. He stood just two feet away from her, staring. His eyes swept over the curve of her cheek, the dark sweep of her eyelashes, and the nervous way her hands gripped the wicker laundry basket. In his jacket pocket, the plastic bag holding her hair felt as heavy as lead.
"Elena," Andrew said. His voice was thick with an emotion Sarah couldn't quite decipher. It wasn't his usual cold authority. It sounded remarkably like grief.
"Yes, sir?" she whispered, forcing herself not to look up into the deep brown eyes she had loved for a decade.
"Take the rest of the day off," Andrew ordered quietly. "You look exhausted. Go to your room and rest."
Sarah’s heart pounded against her ribs. She gave a small, jerky nod. "Thank you, sir."
She hurried past him, her head down, desperate to escape his intense scrutiny before she broke character and threw herself into his arms.
May you like
Andrew watched her descend the staircase until she disappeared into the shadows of the basement. He reached into his pocket and closed his fist around the plastic bag. He had to get to the private lab in the city. He had paid for an expedited DNA comparison against his sons.
Seventy-two hours. That was how long he had to wait to find out if he was losing his mind, or if his wife had finally come home.
