She said it casually, the way she’d learned to talk about her adoption.
“Sure, honey,” I said, and I told myself it was nothing.
Chris thought it was fun. He talked about his ancestry and made jokes about being descended from royalty, while Susan rolled her eyes, and I laughed along with them.
We mailed the samples off and forgot about them.
The results had been mailed directly to Susan, and I hadn’t seen them yet. The day they arrived, something was wrong with her.
She ate dinner without saying much. She kept her eyes on her plate whenever I looked her way. Then she asked Chris if they could talk. Just the two of them.
Something was wrong with her.
I stayed in the kitchen and listened to the door close down the hall, followed by the low murmur of voices and then, clearly and unmistakably, Susan crying.
I didn’t understand what was going on.
Chris came out 20 minutes later holding a folded paper.
“Read this,” he said. He set the paper down in front of me. “The result is interesting. You’ll find it very interesting.”
I didn’t understand what was going on.
The report was one page long. I read the first section twice before the words organized themselves into something I could understand.
Parent-child match. Confidence level: 99.97%.
The maternal line had… my name.
I looked up at Chris. He was watching me read it.
“The hospital listed in Susan’s adoption file,” he said. “You mentioned it once, the night we talked about the baby you gave up. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was barely listening… until I checked the adoption file again just now.”
I didn’t answer. I already knew.
The maternal line had… my name.
“It’s the same hospital, Krystle,” Chris finished. “The same year. The same month.”
The paper in my hands felt as if it weighed 20 pounds. The room had gone very quiet.
Susan was standing in the hallway. I don’t know how long the three of us stood there without speaking.
It was Susan who moved first. Not toward me, but away, backing into the wall as if she needed something solid behind her. Her face was doing six things at once, and I recognized all of them because I had worn versions of them myself for 15 years.
