Chapter 2: The Face in the Window

Chapter 2: The Face in the Window

The three-hour drive was a blur of slick asphalt and hypnotic windshield wipers. The fury that had propelled Ethan from the motel room congealed into a cold, heavy knot in his stomach. He was running on nothing but caffeine and a five-year-old obsession that had just been proven a lie. When he pulled up across the street from Sarah’s building, the storm had softened to a persistent, miserable drizzle. The building was new, all glass and steel, a sterile fortress of the life she had built on the ashes of their own.

He sat for a moment, the engine ticking, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. He looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror—a haunted stranger with hollowed-out eyes. On his forearm, the faded tattoo of a child’s rocket ship was a cruel mockery. He had branded himself with a memory that wasn’t even his.

Finally, he cut the engine and stepped out into the rain. He didn't bother with the main entrance, instead finding her apartment number on the directory and buzzing. Her voice, tinny and cautious through the speaker, was a shock. It was the same, yet different—less worn, more guarded.

“Who is it?”

“Sarah. It’s Ethan.”

Silence. A long, loaded pause that stretched for an eternity. He could picture her on the other side, her hand frozen over the button, her carefully constructed peace shattering.

“Ethan? What do you want?”

“I need to talk to you. Please, just open the door.”

The buzzer sounded, a harsh, electric grunt of surrender.

Her apartment was exactly as he’d imagined: clean, impersonal, and quiet. Shades of grey and white, with not a single photograph on the walls. It was the home of a person who had systematically erased their past. Sarah herself was a ghost from his former life, her features sharper now, her elegance underscored by a deep-seated weariness he knew so well. She wore silk pajamas, her armor of professionalism stripped away, but her posture was rigid.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, her voice a low tremor. She kept her distance, her arms crossed over her chest.

“We need to talk about Leo,” he said, his own voice rough.

A flicker of pain crossed her face, quickly suppressed. “There’s nothing left to say about Leo. That was a long time ago.”

“Was it?” He pulled his phone from his pocket, the screen glowing in the dim light of her entryway. He didn't have to say a word, just turned it so she could see the PDF. The header was clear: Paternity Test Results.

She stared at the screen, her brow furrowed in confusion. “What is this? Some kind of sick joke?”

“Read it, Sarah.”

Her eyes scanned the document, her expression shifting from confusion to disbelief, and then to a cold, rising dread. She saw the names—aliases, but she would know—and then the final, damning conclusion at the bottom.

Probability of Paternity: 0.00%

She looked up at him, her face pale, her composure finally cracking. “This is insane. It’s fake. You’ve lost your mind, Ethan.”

“Have I?” The knot of rage in his gut tightened. “I spent the last five years of my life protecting a boy I thought was my son. The spitting image of the son we buried. A perfect copy, Sarah. Perfect, down to the last strand of DNA. The clinic promised me that. So if he’s not mine… then the first one wasn’t either.”

The accusation hung in the air between them, thick and poisonous.

“Get out,” she whispered, her voice shaking.

“Not until you tell me the truth!” he roared, taking a step forward. The sound was raw, ripped from the deepest part of his shattered soul. “Who was he, Sarah? Who was our son’s father? For fifteen years, you let me believe…”

Tears welled in her eyes, hot and angry. “You have no right to come here, after all this time, and accuse me—”

“I have every right!”

“No, you don’t!” she cried, the sound breaking. “You don’t know anything!”

And then, it all came spilling out. The confession wasn’t of an affair, but of something far uglier, a trauma she had buried so deep she had almost convinced herself it never happened. A business trip, a colleague who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night she had walled off in her memory, convinced it was a nightmare. She had never told anyone. She had pushed it down, explained away the weeks of anxiety that followed, and when she found out she was pregnant, she had clung to the belief—the desperate, absolute need to believe—that the child was Ethan’s. To admit otherwise would have meant confronting a horror she couldn’t bear.

The story tumbled out of her in ragged, painful gasps. As he listened, Ethan’s rage began to dissolve, replaced by a hollow, sickening ache. The clean, sharp lines of betrayal blurred into a messy, shared tragedy. He wasn’t the only victim of a lie; they both were. She hadn’t deceived him out of malice, but out of a desperate act of self-preservation.

He sank onto the arm of her pristine sofa, the fight draining out of him. The rain whispered against the window. For a moment, a fragile, broken peace settled between them. Two grieving parents, finally confronting the true, twisted foundation of their loss.

“I’m so sorry, Sarah,” he mumbled, the words feeling inadequate, pathetic. “I never knew.”

She wiped at her tears with the back of her hand, her body trembling. “You weren’t supposed to. No one was.” She looked at him, her eyes filled with a new, dawning horror. “But this… this test. This clone you made… My God, Ethan, what have you done?”

The question brought him back to the present, to the beat-up sedan parked across the street, to the sleeping child who was the living embodiment of their shared trauma.

“I did what I had to do,” he said, his voice flat. “I couldn’t live without him.”

“He’s not him!” Sarah insisted, her voice rising with a frantic edge. “He’s a… a copy. A thing. You can’t just play God!”

“He’s a five-year-old boy. He’s real,” Ethan said, standing up. The fragile truce was over. He needed to leave. This had been a mistake. All he had done was open a wound that could never be closed. “I have to go.”

He turned and walked toward the door. Sarah followed, her mind racing, trying to process the impossible reality that had just crashed into her life. “Ethan, wait. You need help. We can’t just… you can’t just walk away from this.”

He was already out the door, moving quickly down the hallway toward the elevator, a ghost retreating back into the night. Sarah, acting on an instinct she didn’t understand, ran to the large window in her living room that overlooked the street. She needed to see him leave, to see this nightmare drive away and prove it was real.

She saw him jog across the wet street, a hunched figure against the glare of the streetlights. He fumbled with his keys, then slid into the driver's seat. As he did, the car’s interior dome light flickered on for a brief moment.

And Sarah saw him.

In the passenger seat, a small child was stirring, roused by the sound of the car door slamming. The boy sat up, rubbing his eyes. He turned his head, his face illuminated perfectly for a split second by a passing car’s headlights.

It was the face from her dreams, from the photographs she had hidden away in a box. The dark, messy hair. The soft, full cheeks. The exact shape of his eyes. She would have known that face anywhere, in any lifetime. It was Leo. Her son. Her dead son.

Her breath hitched. Her mind refused to accept what her eyes were seeing. It was a trick of the light, of the rain on the glass. But then the boy lifted his small hand to stifle a yawn, and in the fleeting light, she saw it. A pale, crescent-shaped scar on his palm.

The scream that tore from Sarah’s throat was not a sound of this world. It was a primal, gut-wrenching shriek of pure, unadulterated terror—a sound of grief and madness and impossible recognition. It was the sound of a mother seeing a ghost.

Down on the street, Ethan heard it, even through the closed car door. He saw her silhouette in the window, a frantic, desperate shape. Panic, cold and absolute, seized him. He didn’t think. He reacted. His training, the five years of running, took over.

He slammed the car into drive, stomping on the accelerator. The tires squealed on the wet pavement as the sedan shot forward, leaving a stunned and screaming Sarah standing in the window of her sterile, perfect life. She watched the red tail lights disappear into the rainy darkness, her knuckles pressed against the cold glass, her world not just broken, but annihilated. The starting gun had been fired.