Chapter 18: The Sharks Circle part 3
The silence in Leo’s loft after returning from the apartment was a thick, heavy thing. The adrenaline of the search had bled away, leaving behind a cold, gnawing dread. The ultrasound photo was on the coffee table, a silent, grey-and-white accusation.
“Okay,” Leo said, rolling up the sleeves of his crisp white shirt. He opened a small, professional-looking case on the kitchen counter. Inside lay vials, needles, tourniquets, and alcohol swabs, neatly arranged. “Standard paternity test kits. We get your samples, I messenger them to a private lab I trust. We’ll have the results before the hearing. It’s a baseline. If they try to claim the baby isn’t yours, Diane, we have counter-evidence ready to go.”
Alexandra watched the glint of the needle. “I thought the test was for Diane. To prove she’s… who she is.”
“It is. This is separate. We’re building a fortress, brick by brick. Now. Who’s first?”
Diane, her face still pale, wordlessly held out her arm. She stared at a crack in the ceiling as Leo tied the tourniquet, found a vein, and slid the needle in. Her blood was dark, vivid red as it filled the vial. She didn’t flinch.
When it was Alexandra’s turn, she felt a different kind of cold. This wasn’t just about a baby. This was about truth. Her blood, drawn into the glass, carried the story of the necklace. A story no lab could quantify.
Leo labeled the vials with precise, block letters: A. THOMPSON – MATERNAL. D. WALKER – PATERNAL.
“The lab will rush it. We’ll know by tomorrow afternoon,” he said, sealing the kits in a biohazard bag. He glanced at them, his lawyerly detachment slipping for a moment, revealing something softer, wearier. “Get some rest. There’s nothing more to do tonight but wait.”
But waiting was its own torture. The loft, once a sanctuary, felt like a holding cell. Alexandra slept fitfully, the peanut-shaped ghost on the ultrasound floating behind her eyelids. Diane paced, the soft shuffle of her socks on the wood floor a constant, anxious rhythm.
---
The next day crawled by in a haze of static. Leo was gone, dealing with filings, leaving them with strict instructions to stay put. They ate toast without tasting it. The afternoon sun sliced through the dusty window, illuminating motes of dust dancing like suspended anxiety.
The key turned in the lock just after four. Leo entered, his leather bag slung over his shoulder. His face was unreadable, a carefully composed blank slate. He didn’t greet them. He just walked to the kitchen table, set his bag down, and pulled out a single sheet of paper.
He held it. He didn’t offer it.
“The lab results,” he said, his voice flat, devoid of its usual confident rumble.
Alexandra’s heart hammered against her ribs. Diane had frozen on the couch, a statue of apprehension.
Leo looked from one to the other, his gaze lingering, probing. “The paternity results are… conclusive. Diane Walker is definitively the biological father of Alexandra Thompson’s child.”
A strange, choked sound escaped Diane—a mix of relief and profound terror. Biological father. The words, so clinical, so final, sealed a fate they were still struggling to comprehend.
“That’s good, right?” Alexandra managed to say, her voice thin. “For the case?”
“That’s one piece,” Leo said. His knuckles were white where he gripped the paper. “It’s the other results that are the problem.”
He finally placed the sheet face-up on the table. From the couch, they could see the stark header of the lab, columns of data.
“I ordered a full karyotype analysis on Diane’s sample. Standard procedure in contested identity cases, to check for genetic anomalies that might affect…” He trailed off, then pointed a rigid finger at a line of text. “It’s here. In black and white.”
He read it aloud, each word dropping like a stone into the silent loft. “Genetic analysis indicates a 46,XX karyotype. Results are consistent with a biologically typical female specimen.”
The words hung in the air, nonsense and nightmare intertwined.
“Female,” Leo repeated, as if testing the taste of the word. He looked at Diane, at her short hair, her sharp jawline, the lean frame under a baggy hoodie. He looked at the paternity result, then back at the karyotype. “According to science, Diane Walker is a woman. And according to the same science, she fathered a child.”
A harsh, brittle laugh escaped him. It held no humor. “Now, I’ve seen some creative litigation in my time. I’ve seen forged documents, coached witnesses, fake alibis. But this?” He tapped the paper. “This is a physical impossibility. A contradiction at the level of chromosomes. This isn’t fraud. This is… science fiction.”
He leaned forward, his palms flat on the table, his composed facade finally cracking to reveal raw, frustrated disbelief. “So, I’m going to ask you this once, and I need the absolute truth. Who are you? And what the hell is really going on?”
The loft seemed to shrink, the walls pressing in. Alexandra met Diane’s eyes across the room. It was a silent, desperate conversation. The jig was up. The lies had hit a wall that lab equipment had built.
“We told you the truth,” Alexandra whispered.
“The truth doesn’t do this!” Leo snapped, gesturing violently at the conflicting papers. “Women do not biologically father children. They cannot. So which part of my file is fake? Is Diane not the father? Is she not a woman? What impossible third option am I missing?”
Diane stood up. She moved slowly, like someone in a dream, to her discarded backpack. She unzipped a small inner pocket, her fingers trembling. She pulled out a soft velvet pouch, its fabric worn and dark with age.
She walked to the table and spilled the contents onto the polished wood next to the damning lab report.
The necklace lay there, catching the low afternoon light. The silver was intricate, old, woven like the roots of an ancient tree. The pendant was a smooth, teardrop-shaped moonstone that seemed to hold a cloudy, internal light. It was undeniably beautiful, and it radiated a strange, palpable gravity.
“This is the third option,” Diane said, her voice hoarse.
Leo stared at it. He didn’t touch it. He looked from the necklace to Diane’s face, his expression cycling through confusion, annoyance, and dawning, profound irritation. “A piece of jewelry.”
“It’s a family heirloom,” Alexandra said, forcing herself to her feet. She joined them at the table, drawn to the necklace as if by a magnetic pull. “My grandmother’s. It… it changes you.”
“Changes you.” Leo’s tone was flat, dead.
“It makes women beautiful. Strikingly, unnaturally beautiful. That’s what it did to my grandmother, and her mother before her,and so on and so forth. But if a man wears it…” Alexandra took a shaky breath. “It doesn’t just make him beautiful. It rewrites him. Slowly. Completely. It turns him into a woman. From the inside out.”
The statement landed in total silence. The absurdity of it swelled, filling the space more effectively than any shout.
Leo blinked. He slowly picked up the lab report again, looked at the ‘46,XX’, looked at Diane, looked at the necklace. A long, slow exhale escaped him, a sigh of utter exhaustion. “Okay. Let me get this straight. You are asking me, a Harvard-educated attorney, to believe that an antique necklace is a magical gender-transformation device. And that this… charm… is responsible for these lab results. And for the pregnancy.”
“Yes,” Alexandra said, the word sounding pathetic even to her own ears.
“Magic,” he stated.
“We don’t know what else to call it,” Diane mumbled, staring at the floor.
Leo put the paper down. He pinched the bridge of his nose, his eyes closed. For a full minute, he said nothing. The only sound was the distant hum of the city.
When he opened his eyes, they were sharp, clear, and utterly resolved. “No.”
“Leo—” Alexandra started.
“No,” he repeated, firmer. “I am your lawyer, not a character in a fantasy novel. This?” He flicked a dismissive hand at the necklace. “This is a distraction. A story you’ve told yourselves because the reality is too much to face. The reality is that these results are fabricated, or the samples were contaminated, or there is a mundane, scientific explanation that does not involve fairy tales.”
He gathered the papers, stacking them with sharp, precise movements. “My job is to deal with facts. Facts a judge can understand. A magic necklace is not a fact. It is a one-way ticket to losing custody, credibility, and possibly facing charges for obstructing an investigation with insanity.”
“Then how do you explain the DNA?” Diane challenged, a spark of defiance cutting through her shame. “You saw it! You said it yourself—it’s impossible!”
“I don’t explain it!” Leo shot back, his control fraying. “I work around it! I attack the chain of custody, I hire our own expert to dispute the findings, I create reasonable doubt! I do not stand up in a court of law and present a magic rock as a defense!”
He shoved the papers into his bag. “The hearing is tomorrow. We will go with the planned argument: the test is a discriminatory harassment tactic, an invasion of privacy. We will not mention this.” He pointed a stern finger at the necklace, then at each of them. “And you will not mention it. To anyone. Ever.”
He turned to leave, his mind clearly already on motions and precedents.
“How do we prove it?” Alexandra asked quietly.
Leo stopped, his hand on the doorknob. He didn’t turn around.
“You want proof it’s not just a story?” she continued, a desperate plan forming, born of sheer panic. “You saw what it did to Diane. You have the science that proves it. But you need to see it work. So… test it.”
Now he turned. His brow was furrowed in wary confusion.
“The necklace works on anyone,” Alexandra said, her eyes locked on his. “You said it yourself. If a man wears it, he becomes a woman. A beautiful woman. So put it on. Just for a minute. See what happens. If nothing happens, you’re right. It’s just a story. We’ll do things your way, no argument. But if something does happen… you’ll know. And you’ll have to believe us.”
The proposition hung in the air, ludicrous and dangerous. Diane’s eyes went wide with alarm. “Alex, no, you can’t—”
“It’s the only thing he’ll believe,” Alexandra said, her gaze still fixed on Leo. “You need to see the impossible to believe it, right? So see it.”
"Wait Leo. She's agitated. She’s not telling you everything. Its a slow process. Even if you remove it, it will still turn you into a woman. And.... its permanent. Jeez Alex. What the hell is wrong with you. You have to tell him these kinds of things. Even if hes aggravating us. After all, the help hes given us." Diane stopped him before he picked it up.
Leo’s hand froze, hovering an inch above the moonstone. He slowly straightened, his eyes darting from Diane’s panicked face to Alexandra’s defiant one. The loft’s quiet was suddenly brittle, charged with everything unsaid.
“Permanent?” he asked, his voice dangerously low.
“It doesn’t reverse,” Diane said, the words tumbling out in a rush. “Once it starts, it keeps going. Even if you take it off. Alex didn’t tell you that part. She’s scared, and you’re not listening, but you can’t just… experiment with this.”
Alexandra flinched, shame heating her neck. “I was trying to make you believe us,” she said, but the protest sounded weak, even to her.
Leo pulled his hand back as if the necklace were radiating heat. He paced a tight circle, running that same hand through his perfectly groomed hair, leaving it disheveled. “So, let me summarize this improved fairy tale. This object causes irreversible, biological metamorphosis. It’s not a party trick. It’s a life sentence.”
“It’s the truth,” Alexandra whispered.
He stopped pacing and fixed her with a stare that had probably made seasoned witnesses crumble. “Your truth is a logistical nightmare. It has no precedent. It has no scientific basis a court would accept. It sounds, and I cannot stress this enough, completely deranged.”
“The DNA report is in your bag!” Diane shot back, pointing at the leather satchel. “What’s your scientific basis for that? Huh?”
“Contamination! Lab error! Anything but magic!” Leo’s composure finally snapped, his voice rising. “Because the alternative is that I have to throw everything I know about the world, about the law, about basic reality, out the window!”
He leaned on the table, his weight making the old wood creak. The necklace seemed to gleam brighter under his glare. “You are asking me to bet my license, your futures, and that baby’s safety on a story you’d find in a paperback fantasy novel. Forgive me if I’m struggling.”
The sound of Alexandra’s chair scraping back was sharp. She walked to her own bag, dug past the harness and clothes, and pulled out a small, folded photograph. It was creased and worn. She slid it across the table to Leo.
It was a picture of a young man, maybe eighteen, with a familiar, slightly crooked smile and short, messy hair. He was holding a fish at the end of a dock, grinning at the camera with unabashed, boyish pride.
“That’s me,” Alexandra said, her finger tapping the glossy surface. “Last summer. Before my braindead grandma put the necklaceon me. Thinking i was her daughter, aka my mother.
Leo picked up the photo. He looked at the boy, then at the young woman standing before him—the cascade of hair, the subtle curves, the entirely different bone structure. The eyes, though. The eyes were the same.
“Six weeks,” she said, her voice hollow. “That’s all it took. The changes started small. Softer skin. Then my voice cracked. My hips… ached. It rewrote me, Leo. Completely. Diane’s seen the whole, ugly, confusing process.”
Diane nodded, her anger deflating into exhausted corroboration. “It’s slow, but it doesn’t stop. I stole it from her, okay? I was jealous. I just put it on for a second, thinking I’d sell it. I woke up the next morning and my pajama shirt felt… wrong. My skin felt different.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.”
Leo stared at the photo for a long, silent minute. The evidence was mounting in a direction that defied all rational argument: the impossible DNA, the dated photograph, the raw, unguarded horror on their faces. He placed the picture down gently, next to the damning lab report.
“Okay,” he said finally. The word was soft, defeated. He wasn’t agreeing. He was capitulating to the absurdity. “So, it’s real. This is real.”
A shaky breath left Alexandra. It was the first time an adult hadn’t called her a liar.
“Which makes my job astronomically harder,” Leo continued, the practicalities crashing back in. “We cannot use this. Ever. Megan’s brother would have you both committed, and the court would give him the keys. The pregnancy becomes a ‘freak incident.’ You become lab rats, not parents.”
He finally sat, the fight draining out of him, replaced by a daunting, tactical despair. “Our argument remains the same: harassment, discrimination, privacy. We stonewall the DNA test on principle. We never, ever mention the true origin story.”
“But what if they force the test?” Diane asked, sinking into the chair opposite him.
“Then we hope to God the results are so inexplicable that it creates reasonable doubt in the judge’s mind about their entire case,” Leo said, rubbing his temples. “A mystery is better than a fantasy. We can work with a scientific anomaly. We cannot work with a magic necklace.”
He looked at the object, now with a palpable sense of dread. “Put that away. Somewhere no one will ever find it. It’s not evidence. It’s a weapon.”
Alexandra scooped the necklace back into its pouch, the cool stone feeling alive in her hand. She tucked it deep into her bag, a knot of guilt tightening in her stomach for almost convincing him to touch it.
“We need air,” Leo announced abruptly, standing up. “And we need to not be in this room. I have to think, and the walls are closing in. Get your jackets.”
“Is that safe?” Diane asked, immediately wary.
“Nowhere is safe,” Leo replied, grabbing his own coat. “But sitting here waiting for the sky to fall is making you twitchy, and it’s making me irrational. We’ll drive. We’ll talk. Maybe I’ll finally get the whole, uninterrupted story.”
The industrial district was a ten-minute drive, a landscape of decaying brick and chain-link fences under a bruised purple twilight. Leo parked the sedan near a cavernous, abandoned warehouse, its windows shattered like blind eyes. He killed the engine but left the heater running, the three of them staring out at the desolation.
“Start from the beginning,” Leo said, his gaze fixed on the rusted skeleton of a freight elevator across the lot. “The actual beginning. When the box arrived.”
Alexandra told leo the story of his grandmother's fading mind due to dementia, and mixing him up with his dead mother. "she put it on in her final moments, to which started the transformation, 6 weeks later the transformation was complete, only for the fact she didn't wear it all that much. Diane a few weeks later got stressed out due to his crumbling life and seen that I got all of this attention. So he took my necklace to pawn and make some cash to fight Megan. But he ended up wearing it to hide it when he returned that same day because he couldn't go through with selling it. And he's worn it since. Her transformation was only about a week though because she fully wore the necklace the whole time. The night Daniel penis started to transform was the night we had sex, and I got knocked up. The rest is the last couple weeks or so." Alexandra filled in Leo.
Leo said nothing for a long time. The only sounds were the idle hum of the car’s engine and the distant skitter of something metal against concrete in the wind. The warehouse loomed, a silent judge.
“Dementia,” he finally said, the word flat. He drummed his fingers once on the steering wheel. “So it wasn’t malice. It was… a mistake.”
“A life-changing mistake,” Alexandra whispered, watching her breath fog the window.
“And you,” Leo said, turning his head to look at Diane in the backseat. “You took it because you were jealous. Because her life seemed easier.”
“My life was falling apart,” Diane corrected, her voice tight. “Megan was destroying me. Alex had… this new thing. This shield of being someone else. I just wanted a shortcut. I didn’t ask for a demolition.”
Leo let out a slow, controlled breath, fogging his own window. “A demolition. That’s one word for it.” He turned fully in his seat, his arm resting on the headrest. “So the sex. The pregnancy. That was after?”
“During,” Alexandra said, her face heating. “It was all… confusing. Bodies changing, feelings blurring. We were scared and clinging to the one thing that felt familiar. Each other.”
“Familiar,” Leo echoed. He looked away, out at the rust and shadows. “There is nothing familiar about any of this. Not to me. Not to any judge in any county.” He shifted the car into drive. The headlights cut twin swaths through the gathering dark. “We’re going back. We need a new plan. The old one just got set on fire.”
The loft felt different when they returned. The secrets were out, airing between them like exposed wiring. It was a relief and a new kind of terror.
Leo went straight to the small kitchen, filled a glass with water, and drank it all. He placed the glass down with a definitive clink. “Okay. New rules. The necklace stays in that pouch. It never leaves this room unless we are moving it to a bank vault. We speak of it only here, in whispers, as a theoretical problem. It is not our defense. It is our catastrophic liability.”
“What do we do about the DNA test motion tomorrow?” Diane asked, hovering by the couch.
“We argue it’s irrelevant,” Leo said, his mind visibly clicking through strategies. “The paternity is established. The state has no compelling interest in my client’s genetic makeup beyond that. It’s a fishing expedition designed to harass and humiliate. We play the discrimination card hard. We make the judge uncomfortable about venturing into that territory.”
“Will that work?” Alexandra asked, sinking into an armchair. She felt drained, her earlier defiance gone.
“It’s our only play that doesn’t get us laughed out of court or sent for a psych eval.” Leo ran a hand over his face. “The photo helps. It shows a transition. It doesn’t explain it, but it provides a visual anchor for a story of personal identity we might use later, if we’re desperate. For now, we stick to privacy. We stick to ‘none of your business.’”
He looked at both of them, his gaze sharpening. “You need to be perfect tomorrow. You need to look like two young women being persecuted by a rich, scorned wife and her corrupt brother. You are vulnerable. You are scared. You are in love. You are expecting a child. That’s the story. Sell it.”
Diane gave a slow, shaky nod. “We can do scared. We’re professionals at scared by now.”
A faint, grim smile touched Leo’s lips. “Good. Use it.” He checked his watch. “Eat something. Try to sleep. I’ll be here at seven. We’ll go over your statements one more time.”
He gathered his bag and coat, heading for the bookcase door. He paused, his hand on the latch. He didn’t look back.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, his voice low, “I believe you. And it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard.”
The door snicked shut behind him. The lock turned.
The silence he left behind was different. It wasn’t filled with the pressure of a lie. It was filled with the heavy, ticking weight of a truth too strange to survive in the daylight.
“He believes us,” Diane said, as if testing the concept.
“He does,” Alexandra replied. She pulled the velvet pouch from her bag, holding its weight in her palm. “It doesn’t make any of this easier. It just means our only ally knows he’s defending the impossible.”
Diane walked over and sat on the arm of her chair. She didn’t touch the pouch. She just looked at it. “What happens if we lose?”
Alexandra’s hand instinctively covered her stomach. The peanut-shaped ghost was silent, growing. “Then they take our child. Because we can’t explain her father’s DNA. Because our truth sounds like a lie invented by a madman.”
“Her?” Diane asked, a faint, worn-out curiosity in her tone.
“I don’t know,” Alexandra said. She leaned her head back, closing her eyes. The image of the pulsing white dot on the screen floated behind her lids. “It just felt like a ‘her’ in the moment.”
They sat in the quiet for a long time, listening to the old building settle around them. The fear was a cold constant, but the solitude of it was gone. They had, against all odds, been believed.
Now they just had to make a court believe a much simpler, more palatable fiction.
Tomorrow would be a performance. The most important one of their lives.