“Ms. Nickels, you’ve dragged the defendant, Mr. Young, to court today because you say he denies he’s the father of your thirteen-month-old daughter, Sanee.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“You say it’s time for him to step up and take responsibility.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Young, you say you refuse to accept Sanee because you claim that Ms. Nickels was already pregnant when you began your relationship. And you refuse to allow her to trap you with another man’s baby.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“So, Mr. Young, why do you believe she’s trying to pin a child on you?”

“Well, she doesn’t like the fact that I have moved on and I have a new relationship. And she’s all about getting money out of me. She knows that I was treating her good. She’s been lying since the first time I met her. Just making my life miserable.”

“Have you been making his life miserable, Ms. Nickels?”

“No, Your Honor, I have not. He started denying my daughter before his new relationship. He actually started denying her when I moved out of his house because he was cheating.”

“Really? I’ve known Mr. Young for nineteen years. We met when we were fifteen years old. And when I met him again on Facebook, we automatically moved in together.”

“That’s a lie. We didn’t automatically move in. She hit me up on Facebook. It’s all because she’d been trying to find me, and she really wanted to see me. And as soon as she came over, she was telling the same thing she was when I first met her. Trying to get back into bed. Like always.”

“Wow. So there was no instant connection like she said, Mr. Young?”

“No, there was no instant connection like that. I was getting out of a relationship, Your Honor. And then she hit me up like, ‘Hey, I wanna come over. I ain’t seen you in a long time. Can we hang out?’ So we hung out.”

“Your Honor, I was living with a roommate that was moving to Georgia, and I didn’t know where I was gonna go. So Mr. Young and his family member that he was living with at that time said, ‘Well, Tasha, come on, stay with us.’”

“From October 13th until October 15th we lived together.”

“One year?”

“An entire year.”

“And during that time you all were having a sexual relationship as well?”

“Only that.”

“You said, ‘Only that.’”

“Yeah. ‘Cause there was nothing more. That’s all she wanted to do. There’s plenty of statuses on my Facebook of us together. He even changed his relationship status on Facebook.”

“Really?”

“Yes, ma’am. He told me that he loved me the first night that I was there. That’s why I never left.”

“That’s a lie. She had nowhere to go ’cause she’d been evicted. And the guy she was staying with at that time was her sugar daddy.”

“I was not. He was not my sugar daddy, and I was not being evicted. I could not afford that apartment by myself.”

“She was telling this man that I was her cousin. He would be bringing her over to my house or dropping her off, and she’s telling me that he’s just a friend of the family. Come to find out, he was the man that she was sleeping with.”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Okay, wait a minute. Who is this man?”

“He’s a friend of mine.”

“Do you have sex with him?”

“No, I do not.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventy-three.”

“Seventy-three. Whoa. And he calls him your sugar daddy. What does he do for you?”

“Any and everything I ask him to.”

“Right. Exactly. And, Your Honor, since he wants to go there, he had no problem with this man when we were hungry and I’d call him and he’d bring us something to eat. Anything I’d call and ask this man for, he would come. If I needed a ride to work ’cause he couldn’t take me—he couldn’t provide me with no bus money or anything.”

“Hold on. So you got a little sugar from the sugar daddy, too?”

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

The first hinge landed early in the testimony: “Mr. Young had convinced himself that the seventy-three-year-old friend was the father. But the math wasn’t mathing. And the lie detector test was about to prove that the only thing younger than his doubts was his willingness to face the truth.”

“Mr. Young, do you believe this sugar daddy is Sanee’s father?”

“Yes, I do. Because she’s the same color as him and she looks like him.”

“And so you asked the court to order a lie detector test to determine if Ms. Nickels had slept with this particular man.”

“Yes, she told me she had, Your Honor. She told me she used to sleep with him before she cut it off.”

“No, I did not.”

“That’s what she told me. ‘Cause there ain’t no man going to be giving her no money without him not getting nothing in return. She said, ‘Oh, he’s just a friend of the family.’”

“I told him we had sexual contact, never intercourse.”

“‘Sexual contact.’ What’s sexual contact? That means you sleeping with him. And she also had another young fellow before that that she was messing with before I got with her, too.”

“So you believe that’s why you’re not Sanee’s biological father—because she was intimate with other people?”

“Yes, ma’am. Yes, Your Honor.”

“But you told him, Ms. Nickels, you never had intercourse with that man.”

“Yes. And what about the other guy, were you sleeping with him too?”

“No, I had broken up with that man two years before he came along.”

“She said she broke up. Don’t you mess around with people? I was broken up with him before I started messing with you, Shawn. He was in jail. The man was in jail. I have not heard from this man.”

“Oh, I heard from him constantly on Facebook, telling me not to believe nothing you say ’cause you’re always sleeping around and you ain’t never gonna stop messing with your sugar daddy. He himself told me that. And your family members. His momma told me.”

“So much talking about my sugar daddy. I haven’t lied to either one of them about this man, okay?”

“Yes, you did lie. You lied to the sugar daddy about me. You lied to me at first.”

“Yeah, I lied to him about you, but I did not lie to Shawn about him.”

“You said you lied to the sugar daddy about Mr. Young. What did you say?”

“I told him that he was my cousin.”

“Oh, okay.”

“He would cut my funds off. See? About money. All about money.”

The second hinge arrived with the polygraph results: “Ms. Nickels passed the lie detector test about sleeping with anyone else after her relationship with Mr. Young began. But she failed the question about sexual contact with the sugar daddy. Not intercourse. Contact. And in the world of paternity, sometimes that’s all the doubt a man needs to convince himself he’s not the father.”

“When you got pregnant, Ms. Nickels, you told him?”

“He told me I was pregnant.”

“Really?”

“We were just sitting around, and he just kept looking at me. And I’m like, ‘What are you looking at?’ He was like, ‘Well, you’re pregnant.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, right.’ I didn’t believe I was pregnant. A couple of days later I went to the doctor, and I was pregnant.”

“Did you believe it was your child then, Mr. Young?”

“At first I did. But then when I started looking at the dates, when the baby was born, the dates don’t add up. The baby was due in August. She had her at the end of May. So how can that be my baby?”

“Hold on. Let me see if I can understand this. Ms. Nickels, do you remember the night you believe you conceived?”

“I’d say around the middle of November, around the fifteenth, give or take.”

“And if you calculate this conception date, your due date would be approximately August 12th, 2015.”

“That was my exact due date.”

“And when was Sanee born?”

“May 28th. She was eleven weeks early, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Young, this leads you to believe this is not your biological child?”

“It really just doesn’t add up to me. The baby was dark, and all my kids have a cleft. All my kids have a cleft, and none of my kids are dark-skinned.”

“Like I told him, it’s genes.”

“As she’s getting older, she’s starting to look like her sugar daddy. She’s starting to look like the man.”

“All right. I have administered a lie detector test, Mr. Young, because you believe Ms. Nickels is not telling you the truth. So she submitted to a lie detector test, and I have those results. Ms. Nickels, you met with a licensed polygraph examiner. When we asked you if once you began a sexual relationship with Shawn, did you have sexual intercourse with anyone else, you said—”

“Yes.”

“And the lie detector determined you were being truthful. Mr. Young, you seemed surprised by that.”

“No, I’m saying I already knew that. I knew that she was messing around ’cause I told you—the mother of the young person she was messing with told me and friends of her family told me.”

“All right, now when asked if you had sexual contact with the man you refer to as your sugar daddy, you said no. And the lie detector test determined you were being deceptive.”

“We have had sexual contact before, never intercourse. And it was not while I was with Shawn.”

“So does this further fuel your doubt, Mr. Young?”

“Oh, I’m on fire right now. I’m on fire. Because I knew this. All I wanted her to do was to tell me the truth.”

The third hinge came from the witness stand: “Laquita Strode, Mr. Young’s current girlfriend, did something remarkable. She didn’t defend him blindly. She said the baby might be his. She said the family was pressuring him to deny it. And in a courtroom full of accusations, she chose honesty. That’s not loyalty to a man. That’s loyalty to a child she’d never met.”

“Ms. Strode, you are Mr. Young’s—”

“Girlfriend. New girlfriend.”

“Do you believe Sanee is his biological daughter?”

“Actually, Your Honor, all of the family is stating, ‘Oh, that’s not your baby. That’s not your baby.’ But I’m the only one out of everybody that’s given her the benefit of the doubt and said, ‘This may be your child.’”

“Why do you feel that way?”

“‘Cause to me, some of her features do resemble Shawn. And if there’s a chance that this baby could be his, he needs to know and not just listen to what everybody else says. I’m not here to bash anybody. I’m just trying to get the truth just like everybody else.”

“She’s asserted that he’s still trying to have a romantic relationship with her. And if that’s the situation, he can have her.”

“Ms. Strode, because you speak so eloquently, but from what I witnessed today, your boyfriend is still right along with it. They don’t miss a beat.”

“Absolutely.”

The DNA results arrived with the weight of a hammer. “In the case of Nickels v. Young, when it comes to thirteen-month-old Sanee Young, it has been determined by this court, Mr. Young, you are the father.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“And I see tears in your eyes. What are you feeling?”

“Because his dad wasn’t in his life, so he should know how I would feel, how his mom felt. Break the cycle.”

“Ms. Greenhouse, you summoned Mr. Thompson to court for a DNA test for your seven-month-old son, Gei.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“You claim he has neglected his responsibilities as a father since you called off the wedding last month.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Additionally, you’re also suing Mr. Thompson for $750, the amount of the down payment you put on a vehicle for him.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Thompson, you claim Ms. Greenhouse confessed to having sexual intercourse with another man one week before you reconnected from a break. You say it’s impossible that you are her child’s father.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Now, your mother, Susan Thompson, is here as well and also questions the paternity of this child.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Ms. Greenhouse, first to you. You were gonna marry him, and now he’s denying your son?”

“Yes, Your Honor. Explain. I was gonna marry Gregory. We were dating for eleven years, off and on. I have a four-year-old son by Gregory, and I also have a seven-month-old by Gregory. I called off the wedding because Greg is insecure and disrespectful. And I don’t wanna marry someone like that.”

“After eleven years, you just figured that out?”

“No, we were together for eleven years off and on. I went off to college right after I had my four-year-old son. I got pregnant. We tried to make it work there. And between the four years after my son was born, we tried off and on, and it still hasn’t worked out. I just finally got tired of it. Every time I turn around, it’s ‘You messing with this person, you’re sleeping with this person.’ But Greg dropped me off at work. Everywhere I go, he has my phone. He dropped me off and picked me up. So where’s the time to cheat on you?”

“Out of eleven years, eight of them, I was the one trying to keep this together when it always fell apart because of her. Her family and all the rest.”

“You’re not in a relationship with my family. You’re in a relationship with me.”

“But why do they always come up? How does everybody think they got more authority over me and mine?”

“Explain to me what’s going on here. You’re saying her family caused the rift as well?”

“Me and Gei, we weren’t even together—”

“How come you stayed in my house—”

“I was going over—”

“Hold on, Mr. Thompson. So you’re saying when you made Gei—meaning you are Gei’s father, you believe?”

“At the time we conceived him, or suppose we conceived him, she was still having sex with multiple partners.”

“That’s a lie. You asked me who did I have sex with? It was never multiple partners. I told you two weeks prior that we had sex with somebody else. Two weeks prior.”

“She testified two weeks before, and you’re questioning that time frame? If so, how?”

“Around that time, we weren’t together. We were seeing each other a little cordially, here and there, but not really. But we were sleeping together, Your Honor. I guess it was around—I can’t remember exactly the time. But when everything happened, even with leading up to that time, I’d already confronted her, and she admitted out of her own mouth—the pictures, the texts, the messages, everything.”

“What pictures? We were a family. Everything I showed her, she told me and admitted to it on her own.”

“I cut off everybody to be in a relationship with you. So how is it a problem?”

“That’s a lie.”

The fourth hinge landed in the middle of the Thompson family’s chaos: “Gregory Thompson had been with Christen for eleven years. He had a four-year-old son with her. He had signed the birth certificate for the seven-month-old. He had helped choose the name ‘Gei’ in the hospital. But when things fell apart, he suddenly remembered doubts about paternity. The doubts didn’t come from science. They came from pain. And pain is a terrible mathematician.”

“Mr. Thompson, did you help choose the name?”

“I did. I chose the name. I came up with it.”

“And you were at the hospital when Gei was born?”

“I’ve been with her the whole time she was pregnant.”

“And you signed the birth certificate?”

“Before we signed the birth certificate, I asked him if he wanted a DNA test. He told me, ‘No.’”

“Ms. Greenhouse has suggested that she asked you about a DNA test, and you declined.”

“I said something about it, and she said, ‘They said they’re not gonna do that here.’”

“That’s a lie.”

“Ms. Greenhouse, you said you have a witness that can testify that, in fact, he did deny wanting a DNA test?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Shawnta Gunnels, Christen Greenhouse’s youngest sister. I was on the phone with her when it came up to them going to the hospital to have Gei. Chrissy was talking to Greg. She was like, ‘Hey, make sure—’ right before they brought in the paperwork, the affidavit stuff. She was like, ‘Are you sure you wanna do that? We can get a DNA test.’ Greg said, ‘Man, shut up. For what?’ That’s exactly what he said.”

“And you heard that?”

“I was on the phone with her.”

The DNA results for Gei landed with finality: “In the case of Greenhouse v. Thompson, when it comes to seven-month-old Gei Thompson, it has been determined by this court, Mr. Thompson, you are the father.”

“You are the father. I feel more relief than I had when I didn’t.”

“For what? You knew this from jump.”

“You knew I had doubts from jump.”

“Everyone’s entitled to their beliefs or doubts, but my whole thing is, don’t doubt my son when I break up with you ’cause you’re disrespectful.”

“Kids don’t always look the same. They don’t.”

“Mr. Allen, you say Ms. Diaz has been desperately trying to pin her son on you for the last year and a half, and you want it to stop. You say that barring the invention of a teleportation machine, it would have been impossible for you to have fathered her child, Jordan. Is that correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ms. Diaz, you say Mr. Allen is a delusional man-child with a fuzzy memory who refuses to accept responsibility for his own son. You say Mr. Allen is your child’s father and you intend to prove paternity today. Is that correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So, Mr. Allen, why is it impossible for you to have fathered Jordan?”

“I wasn’t even in the same state as her at that time. I was in Tennessee, and she was in Indiana. And at that time, she was in a relationship with another guy, and I was in a relationship with another female. So at that time, we weren’t even in the same state. So it really doesn’t add up. You don’t have to be a genius to know that does not add up.”

“He said he wasn’t in the same state, Ms. Diaz.”

“That’s a lie. We had Easter together at my house.”

“And you believe that’s the window of time when you conceived?”

“Yeah, that’s what the doctor said. A week before or a week after Easter. And Easter’s in April. If you do the math, nine months later.”

“You don’t remember this Easter day?”

“No, ma’am. Because at the time, I was with another female. And her friend wanted us to go have Easter dinner with her and her family. This was in Tennessee.”

“So you’re saying you remember the plans you had in Tennessee for Easter?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So people asked you to come over and you said, ‘No, I’m not going to go.’ But you know you were in Tennessee.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So what was the nature of your relationship?”

“Our relationship’s always been rocky. We first started dating in 2016 in Evansville. And she was originally just supposed to be a hook-up. But we ended up talking and hitting it off, and she moved in with me not too soon after. We were good for the first maybe three, four months. Then after that, it was always fighting and bickering. A lot of back and forth. We moved to Tennessee, and that’s when it got worse.”

“So at some point you break up. When did you decide it was over?”

“Over-over, it was May of 2017.”

“And by then I was pregnant. I didn’t know about it. I found out I was pregnant in September. I’d been about four months.”

“When you confided in him and told him ‘I’m pregnant,’ what was his response?”

“‘That’s not mine. That can’t be.’ And I was like, ‘I didn’t just make him myself.’ Four months later, if you do the math, it leads to April. We were together in April. Which is Easter.”

“And so, Mr. Allen, how is it you said this wasn’t your child? Why did you think it wasn’t your child?”

“Let’s backtrack a little bit. She said the conception date was around Easter. Well, a month before Easter was the last time that we had done anything. And I told her, ‘I’m not gonna fight. I’m not gonna argue with you. Pack your stuff and leave. Get out. I’m not doing this again.’”

“Well, I had all my ducks in a row. I was doing good, had a good-paying job. And she texts me out of nowhere and she’s like, ‘Hey, I’m pregnant.’ And my response to her was ‘Good for you. Congratulations.’ Like, what does that have to do with me?”

“Oh.”

“And she goes, ‘Well, you’re the father.’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m not. What makes me the father? Prove it.’”

“So, Ms. Diaz, during this time, were you dating anybody else?”

“Not really. I mean, it happened maybe once or twice. But it wasn’t like I would do something to somebody consecutively. It was a one-at-a-time thing if I did.”

“Was ‘one-time thing’ meaning sex a one-time thing?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, so that’s all it takes. How many people did you sleep with during the break-up?”

“One time. But during the break-up, I was already pregnant with Jordan.”

“She was sleeping with two other guys at the time, Your Honor. Multiple best friends of hers told me that she was with at least two guys. And that’s two that I know of. And she texted me, actually, herself about this one guy she was hooking up with.”

“What did she say?”

“She would say, ‘Well, I’m with another guy now. You don’t have to keep texting me and making sure that I’m okay.’”

“But why, if we’re broken up, why would you still text her?”

“Because it was the right thing to do?”

“If you wanna check in just on me, then why didn’t you check in the whole pregnancy when I was pregnant?”

“Because none of it added up. Whenever I told her to prove that I’m the father, she would send me pictures of the ultrasound and pictures of the doctor’s appointments and update me on it. And I would say the dates of conception did not add up to whenever me and Ms. Diaz were last together. Like, together-together.”

The fifth hinge came from the witness stand: “Austyn Griffin, Mr. Allen’s cousin, swore that he and Matthew ate hamburgers and hotdogs on Easter Sunday in Tennessee. Ms. Diaz swore she ate turkey and deviled eggs with Matthew in Indiana. Two Easters. Two menus. Two entirely different realities. One of them was lying. And the DNA was about to tell the court which one.”

“Mr. Griffin, you are Mr. Allen’s cousin. So what do you know about this situation?”

“I know that Matthew was with me during the time of conception because like he said, we were dating two other females. They invited us to have Easter dinner with their family. We declined, of course. We went with my family. That’s how I know he wasn’t around there. ‘Cause he was with me.”

“And how can you be so certain that was Easter?”

“Because you don’t have Easter dinner any other day.”

“What did y’all eat?”

“There was a lot of stuff. Hamburgers, hotdogs.”

“That ain’t Easter dinner.”

“That’s what we ate.”

“Ms. Diaz, Mr. Allen brought a witness to say he was with him and he wasn’t in the state during Easter. Are you sure you’ve got the dates right?”

“Yes, yes, ma’am. What did you eat for Easter dinner? Potato salad, deviled eggs, I think a turkey.”

“Now that’s more like Easter dinner. You said you and him bought it?”

“Yeah, yes, ma’am.”

Two different stories. She said they went and got the turkey together. Mr. Allen and his cousin said they were together on Easter but eating Fourth of July food.”

“We must have been turkey shopping on FaceTime, ’cause I wasn’t there with her.”

The DNA results for Jordan landed with finality: “In the case of Allen v. Diaz, when it comes to one-year-old Jordan Diaz, it has been determined by this court, Mr. Allen, you are the father.”

“You are the father. That is your handsome little boy. He definitely got more of your cousin’s genes, though. But he’s yours.”

The sixth and final hinge arrived as Mr. Allen, who never knew his own biological father, learned he was a dad: “Matthew Allen grew up without a father. He didn’t know his name. He didn’t know his face. But when the DNA test came back, he didn’t run. He cried. Because he understood something that most men never learn: being a father isn’t about biology. It’s about breaking the cycle. And he was ready to break it.”

“I see the tears in your eyes. It means something to you to be a father. Is this your first child?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And I know it’s important to you because of what you went through, not knowing your biological father. Do you know how incredible it is on this day that you had the courage to break a generational curse? That everything you went through, now Jordan does not have to go through?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How does that sound to hear, Ms. Diaz?”

“It sounds nice. It does. I’ve waited for a year and a half for this. So it’s like a pat on the back and about time.”