I drill into Debbie’s profile on my second monitor and comb through all of her online photos. If she knew she had a grandson, rogue or not, she would post it. Maybe she wouldn’t tag him or drive extra attention to it, but I’m determined to find some visual wherein this kid is accidentally pictured in the background of a family dinner.

I dig and I dig and I dig, but I find nothing. As frustrating as that seems, it’s actually a breath of fresh air. It’s entirely possible, and extremely likely, there is no relationship between the Austins and Gemma Sutherland, despite what she claims. Without so much as 1 percent of a link anywhere online, it serves as further evidence that there is no proof this kid was fathered by Decker.

So my next step is to go down the rabbit hole one step further and attempt to link Gemma to at least one other guy during the same time frame who’s a plausible match to be Aiden’s real dad. For me, it is not enough to just prove Decker isn’t the father. I need to show there’s sufficient evidence for the father being someone else. I need to search for someone who is like Decker, but didn’t just suddenly pass away and become an instant pond for this girl to go life-insurance-money fishing in.

I use what I know and recall how Decker was an education major and a star athlete at USC. There’s no way he’d dabble in hooking up with faculty from some other department and then risk getting kicked off the lacrosse team—or worse, out of USC completely, which also happens to be his father’s alma mater. It just wouldn’t be something that fell in his moral scope at all, I don’t care how many Bud Lights were involved that night at the party.

In fact, I reckon it takes a specific type of person—an immature thrill-seeker; maybe a guy like douchebag Chad—to have the balls to hook up with his teacher and not use protection. That’s when I get the idea to create a ranking system, similar to a March Madness basketball bracket, to narrow in on the real person who fathered this kid.

I go through every photo I can get my eyes on from Gemma’s past feed—from the one where she’s doing a beer bong at a frat house, to the selfie with her favorite barista, to Thanksgiving dinner eight years ago—and throw it into my algorithm. No photographed man is off-limits for my data mining—if he has testicles and was in a photo with her around the time this child was conceived, he’s the potential father. I even go so far as to download a facial recognition program so even if she didn’t tag them in the post, my algorithm will find out who they are based on similar-looking images on other social platforms.

An hour later, I’ve found a bottle of wine to keep me company and my bedroom wall is slathered in fluorescent-colored Post-its. But despite its chaotic nature, I’ve narrowed it down to a “Final Four” of sorts and guess what? Decker is not on there. In no way, shape, or form have my statistics shown any viable link between her and him—other than the fact he took a class she once TA’d called “Intro to Socialism.” But so what? There must have been a hundred people in that class and not all of them wound up being accused of fathering a kid. So that link doesn’t worry me; it’s a dead end.