Behind Maël, Élise was crying. Hélène ordered that the babies be taken upstairs. Then Maël’s voice dropped.
— So… whose children are these?
Camille looked at the file again. One note had troubled her: a reference number, the name of a laboratory in Toulouse, and the mention of a transfer of medical data carried out 18 months earlier.
“Ask Elise a question,” she said.
– Which ?
— Ask him why your old fertility file was sent to Toulouse.
She heard him turn around.
— Elise?
The sobs stopped abruptly.
That silence was tantamount to a confession.
“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Elise stammered.
“An authorization has been signed,” said Camille. “I just sent it to you.”
Thirty seconds passed.
“That’s my signature,” Maël murmured.
— No. She looks like her.
Camille had watched Maël sign for 9 years. She knew the D in Delorme was too sharply slanted. On the document, it was almost perfect.
Almost.
Elise finally broke down.
— I needed information.
“What for?” Maël yelled.
— To help us have children!
— You told me they were conceived naturally!
Hélène spoke again, her voice now trembling.
— Ask him which donor the clinic used.
Elise looked at the ground.
— I was told it was someone from the Delorme family.
And Helen, suddenly livid, understood before anyone else.
— My God… not him.
PART 4
The next morning, Camille took the first train to Toulouse.
She wasn’t going there to save Maël. Not to forgive Élise. Even less to mend the pieces of a family that had treated her like a defective part for years.
She went there because the truth had just affected two babies who hadn’t asked for anything.
At 11:20 a.m., she entered a glass-walled meeting room on the top floor of a private clinic located behind the Allées Jean-Jaurès. Maël was already there, pale and drawn. Hélène stood straight by the window, her hands clasped with the stiffness of a former bourgeois woman who refuses to break down in public. Adrien, Maël’s brother, stared at the table as if hoping the wood would give him an answer.
Elise hadn’t come.
His absence said it all.
Opposite them, the clinic’s lawyer placed a beige folder on the table.
— There have been irregularities concerning several old patient files.
Maël leaned forward.
— Stop with your fancy sentences. Has my file even been used?
The lawyer hesitated.
– Yes.
— Was my genetic material used?
— Non.
Maël closed his eyes. For a second, he seemed almost relieved. Then he opened his eyelids again.
— So whose one?
The lawyer looked at Hélène.
This simple movement is enough.
Helene put a hand to her mouth.
— Non.
The file indicated that a donor had been linked to a so-called “family compatible” procedure, a formula vague enough to mask the illegality, precise enough to guide the choice.
The donor’s number corresponded to a certain Damien Morel.
Adrien frowned.
— I don’t know that name.
Hélène, for her part, sat down as if her legs had just given way.
“Damien Delorme,” she murmured. “He changed his name.”
Maël turned a blank stare towards her.
— Who is Damien?
Hélène did not answer right away. Camille saw in her eyes an old shame, carefully folded and stored for decades in the drawers of silence.
“Your father had another son,” she said finally. “Before Adrien was born. With another woman.”
Maël stood up abruptly.
— You mean I have a half-brother?
– Yes.
— And the twins…
The lawyer lowered her eyes.
— Biologically, it is very likely that they are the children of Damien Morel.
Maël backed up to the window. Camille expected rage, insults, a shard of glass. But he simply stared at the street below.
“I carried that little boy believing he was my son,” he whispered.
No one answered.
For a moment, all of Maël’s cruelty wasn’t enough to make his grief easy to watch. He had betrayed Camille, humiliated her, used children as trophies in a war she had never chosen. Yet, seeing him realize that his dream had been built on a lie was still painful.
Because punishment doesn’t always ask if someone deserves it.
Then the lawyer added:
— There is another complication.
Maël turned around.
– Which ?
— Mr. Morel claims he never authorized the use of his genetic material for this procedure.
The room temperature changed.
Damien had once worked with this clinic as part of a legal preservation program related to genetic research. His samples should never have been used without further authorization. So someone had circumvented the rules. Someone had requested a donor related to Maël. Someone had chosen Delorme blood like one chooses a key to open a safe.
“Why would Elise have done that?” asked Adrien.
Hélène answered before Camille.
— Because of the foundation.
Maël narrowed his eyes.
— Which foundation?
Helene sat up with difficulty.
— The Delorme Heritage Foundation. Your father created it before his death. You only know part of it.
She then explained what no one had ever told Camille. The foundation held buildings, industrial shares, investments, and vineyards valued at nearly 84 million euros. Control was to pass to the first descendant of Maël’s generation able to produce two surviving biological children bearing the Delorme name.
The twins were not necessary.
But 2 children were.
Maël sat back down slowly.
“She didn’t want a family,” he murmured. “She wanted the foundation.”
Camille shook her head.
— No. That’s not enough.
They all looked at her.
— If the children are Damien’s, Maël doesn’t meet the requirements. Élise therefore had to have the children legally recognized as hers long enough to transfer the assets elsewhere.
She took out her tablet. While the others were talking about babies, Camille had continued to track the money. She showed a company created three months earlier by Maël, with the help of Élise and the financial director of Valorys, a certain Martin Caradec. Officially, it was for wealth management. In reality, the structure was supposed to receive the foundation’s assets as soon as the heirs were certified, then transfer them to a second company.
