Aryyah sat across from Cletus at his kitchen table two days after their revelation conversation, both of them reviewing information about prenatal paternity testing on her laptop; the screen displayed a medical website explaining the non-invasive procedure that could be done as early as nine weeks, requiring only a blood draw from the mother and DNA samples from the potential fathers.

"It says here the test is 99.9% accurate," Aryyah read aloud, scrolling through the technical details. "They ...