Many years ago?”
Eleanor’s eldest son, Mark, frowned deeply, exchanging a wary glance with his siblings. “I’m sorry, Father, but what are you saying?” he asked. “Do you know something we don’t?”
Was there a confessional?” one of the daughters asked. Father Michael took a deep breath and swallowed his nerves. “I don’t know,” he said, looking at Mark.
“And no, your mother didn’t come to confessional. But I have reason to believe that it is true… If… if I could request a DNA test, just to put this to rest, I would be grateful.”
A wave of discomfort swept over the group, some of them shifting uncomfortably. Mark’s face hardened, skepticism clearly written all over.
“With all due respect, Father, this sounds preposterous. Trust me, our mother was an upstanding woman. She would have told us if something like this were true.”
Father Michael shifted on his feet.
“I understand that,” he said. “It’s just that Eleanor could have had her child very young, and while she wouldn’t have done anything wrong by allowing that child to be adopted, the child still exists.”
Father Michael knew he was speaking as a priest, but he couldn’t turn it off. He had been trained to speak softly and objectively.
And even now, he didn’t know how to fight for this DNA test. Instead, he nodded and began to back away before anything else happened. “Wait,” Anna, Eleanor’s youngest daughter, said.
