"I don't like the idea of bringing up your willingness to trade Danielle for Sam to the judge at all," said Herb when Todd and Blair updated him on the situation. "I don't think he'll be impressed by the idea that you suggested trading a child like a baseball card."

"You didn't see Dani's face light up," said Todd. "It was exactly what she wanted. She certainly didn't think she was being treated like a baseball card."

"The judge won't have seen her face either," Herb pointed out. "Todd, I'm not criticizing you. I understand that this is a uniquely complicated situation, and what you proposed would have benefitted all the children involved. It was a generous gesture. Really. But the idea is going to have an inherent distaste for someone who has not been intimately involved with the particular complications of your family. Reading about it in the papers isn't the same as living it."

"Can't deny that," agreed Todd. "Only about half of what I print in my paper is true."

"You're all the way up to half?" teased Blair, glad to see the mood lightening.

"Well, almost." He trailed his fingers along her arm, and something deep inside Blair thrilled. There had been a time when Todd would not have been able to make even this chaste display of physical affection in public. Worse, there had been the long, lost eight years.

"The thing that bothers me," Blair told Herb to get her mind back on the subject at hand, "is the way Walker and Dani were ready to take the deal and then they stalled. They obviously changed their minds. If they wanted to do it, it could have been done by now."

"I agree. It could have," Herb confirmed. "You're right, Blair, something changed."

"Walker went to see Tea and she changed his mind," Blair proposed. "She told him something that made him want to give up the idea of adopting Dani. There's nothing he wants more than that. He adores that girl, dotes on her." An unpleasant remembrance of the way her own children had been brushed aside as soon as Walker had met Dani washed over her. "He wouldn't give up the chance to adopt her for anything."

"Then it stands to reason that he doesn't think he gave it up."

"He can't adopt Dani if I don't give up my rights. If that was how it worked, Blair and I would just ninja-adopt Sam."

Blair had a sudden vision of throwing Sam an adoption party where everyone dressed as ninjas. The idea had merit.

"The obvious question- and I'm sorry, but I have to ask this- is whether you really are Dani's father. Are you absolutely sure?"

"Of course he is," said Blair. "There was a DNA test."

Todd shrugged noncommittally. "DNA tests can be faked. A DNA test had this whole town believing that Walker Laurence was me, and then that he was my twin brother."

"Tea didn't have access to the kind of technology Mitch used," Blair pointed out. A flutter of nasty, vindictive hope was growing inside of her and she did her best to squash it.

"She had access to the samples. She had access to the lab. Who knows what she had access to? Tea usually gets what she wants by whatever means necessary." He shook his head at Blair. "Aren't you the one who's usually accusing me of underestimating Tea?"

"This just sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me," Blair said weakly.

"I wouldn't wish away Dani. She's a good kid."

"You don't like the idea of having children by different women. You never have, not since you found out about Victor Lord having children by his daughter's best friend."

"That's not why-" Todd snapped, and then went sullenly silent mid-sentence.

Herb intervened. "I'm going to ask you three questions very quickly, and then this part of the conversation will be over. All right?"

"No," said Todd.

Herb ignored him. "Did you have unprotected sex with Tea Delgado about nine months before Dani was born?"

"Yes," said Todd, and Blair summoned the willpower not to clap her hands over her ears like a child. She knew where babies came from. She did not need to hear this.

"Did someone else have unprotected sex with Tea Delgado about nine months before Dani was born?"

"I didn't stand there and watch or anything," said Todd.

"What makes you think that the other man was the father rather than you despite the DNA test?"

Todd shook his head. "Some things you don't tell even your attorney. Next topic."

Blair was amazed that Herb had even gotten that far.

After the meeting, when she and Todd were alone, Blair asked herself over and over again whether she wanted to know.

She didn't, she decided over and over again. Todd's sex life when they weren't together was Todd's business. She was jealous that he'd been with someone else, but she had been with other men. She was jealous that someone else had had his child, but she had carried Patrick's son until he'd been ready to face the world on his own, and Walker's son far too briefly...

But she had Walker's other son to think about. If Tea had been lying about Dani's paternity all these years, that might be the leverage Blair needed to keep Sam. There could be nothing worse than losing Sam. Sam was more than worth the risk of the horrible things she would have to imagine and then somehow bleach out of her brain.

"Todd?"

"Yeah?"

"The question you wouldn't answer for Herb."

He laughed wryly. "I was wondering how long it would take for you to ask."

"I wouldn't ask at all if there wasn't some chance it could help Sam."

"When we were in Key West last year, I watched Dani walk on the beach. She walks like Ross."

Blair couldn't help feeling disappointed. "That's it? Todd, Sam talks so much like I do that it's scary. It doesn't make him my blood."

"It was one time with Tea," Todd continued.

Blair took that argument even less seriously. "Let me introduce you to our children. Jack in particular. You've never exactly had fertility issues. Kelly used to bitch that all you have to do is look at me and I get pregnant."

"I'm pretty sure I have to do more than that," said Todd.

"So you did that with Tea? And please give me as few details as possible."

"I did more than look at her. I did less than I did when we ended up with Jack." He smirked slightly. "Or Starr. Or Sage."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"The way your loving ex Walker put it when he was telling me how much you enjoyed having sex with him was that I didn't get my rocks off with Tea."

"I didn't enjoy sex with Walker. It sucked," Blair lied dutifully. It seemed only fair to say, under the circumstances, when she was giddy with an unexpected ego-boosting victory. He didn't want her the way he wanted me. Always. "But if you never- if you're saying not at all-"

"Sort of." Todd made an obscene gesture that left Blair burying her face in her hands to choke off her laughter. "Things started off mediocre and they went downhill from there."

"But you aren't sure. You're saying it's technically possible."

"Didn't they tell you in fifth grade health class that sperm can get into pre-ejaculatory fluid?"

Pre-ejaculatory fluid?! They'd managed to get into a conversation so ridiculous that Todd had left behind his usual euphemisms and obscenities and resorted to a biology textbook. She jumped up to hug him, hard, to soften the blow of her laughter. "They sent the girls to a different class. Yours sounds more useful."

He grumbled something incoherent into her hair and hugged her back. "I came back here and you were all so damn sure she was mine. I had other priorities and it's technically possible, so whatever. But if she's mine, it was something a lot less likely than what happened with Jack."

"Okay," Blair agreed. "We'll get a sample from Dani. We'll get our own DNA test so we know what we're working with here."

"Good."

"But, Todd?"

"What?"

"Tea didn't even notice?"

He sighed heavily. "Blair, you know Delgado notices exactly what she wants to notice."

Todd felt dirty when he watched her do it, right in the privacy of their own home.

Dani arrived to spend the afternoon with Starr, and Blair enveloped her in a gushing, affectionate hug amidst much praise and stroking of hair. When Dani had disappeared up the back stairs to Starr's apartment, Blair held up her hand to reveal a dark, curling strand of hair.

Things had changed since Todd had been shut into Victor Lord's crypt a decade before. There was such a thing as mail-in DNA testing. Drop two samples into an envelope under a fake name and off they went to a lab where no one knew or cared about the Lord-Mannings of Llanview. It wouldn't be admissible in court, but it would give them the truth.

Expelled from college under a cloud of both crimes and academic failure though he had been, Todd still knew better than most that knowledge was power.

"I want you to open it," Todd told Blair when nondescript envelope returned, rush delivery, your-signature-here, four days later.

"She's your daughter," Blair pointed out as she took the envelope but made no move to open it.

"Probably not," said Todd, more to prepare himself than Blair. Blair was going to be happy; he could tell. She'd barely refrained from jumping up on the nearest table and dancing when he'd told her why he agreed right away with Herb's theory on the nature of Walker's about-face. He took very real pride in her jealousy and possessiveness. For all that, he was going to be sorry to lose the girl he had truly begun to like.

Worse, he would be equally sorry to learn for sure that she was his and give up the security blanket of privately thinking he had an excuse if he didn't quite put the effort into connecting with Dani that he put into connecting with Jack.

How very Victor Lord of him.

"Hey." Blair ran her hand down his face the way she did. "Either way, it's going to be okay."

"Open it already," he whispered hoarsely.

He knew the answer long before she said anything. The vindictive, vicious, victorious gloat flashed across her face before she composed herself into the alleged generous adult who thought only of the well-being of others took over and gently told him that he'd been right.

"Stick it in the safe," he ordered. Admissible in court or not, they couldn't very well leave the thing lying around for anyone to stumble across and wonder at. And he sure as shit wasn't going to destroy it, not yet.

"Todd..."

He wasn't in the mood for sympathy. "You want Jack to find it and think we were testing him? You know he would."

Blair vanished to put the test away.

Todd poured himself three fingers of scotch and began to contemplate his testimony.

"Your Honor, DNA doesn't matter to my wife or to me or to any real parent. I know it doesn't matter to the petitioner, or she would never have pretended Ross Rayburn wasn't Danielle's father..."

The piece of shit identity thief Walker Laurence was not going to rip Sam out of his home.

The piece of shit identity thief Walker Laurence was not going to break Blair's heart.

And Tea Delgado was not going to get one over on Todd Manning.