The DNA Matched My Cousin, Not Me, So They Kept Me Anyway novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Twenty-Five Percent

The host reads the card live: Rhea is Constance's niece and Sabina is the daughter, and Sabina runs, taking Rhea with her until Garner orders Rhea out of the guest suite.

"Welcome back," the host said, and then he looked at the card in his hand and stopped talking.

Nobody on the couch spoke.

Sabina stood in the middle of the stage holding my lilies against her green coat, shaking so hard the petals trembled.

The host cleared his throat.

"We have the result," he said. "I'll read it exactly as the lab wrote it."

Garner Harrowgate nodded at him from behind the couch.

I stayed on my feet at Sabina's side, because I wasn't going to let anyone say I'd sat down for this.

"Rhea Quillan shares twenty-five percent of her DNA with Constance Harrowgate," the host read. "The lab reports that this is the relationship of an aunt and a niece."

The studio went so quiet I could hear the lights.

Twenty-five percent.

That was the number on my results page.

I had shown it a hundred times to a woman who held my wrist and cried.

"Rhea Quillan is a niece of the Harrowgate family," the host said, "and a first cousin to the Harrowgates' daughter."

His voice shook on the next line.

"Sabina Doyle shares fifty percent with both Donald and Constance Harrowgate. She is their daughter."

Mrs. Harrowgate made a sound I will never forget.

It wasn't a scream.

It was twenty-four years coming out of her at once.

She came off the couch with her arms open.

Mr. Harrowgate came after her with his hand on his chest.

A man in the third row stood up and started to clap, and then a hundred people were on their feet.

Sabina took one step backward.

"No," she said. "No, no. Rhea."

"It's all right," I said.

"It isn't. I didn't even open my kit."

Mrs. Harrowgate stopped with her hands out and her face wet.

"Sabina," she said. "Sweetheart. Oh, my God. You have his chin."

Sabina looked past her at me.

"I'm not going anywhere without Rhea," she said.

Then she put the lilies in the host's lap and ran.

She went through the side door by the green room with her coat flapping.

The audience gasped all the way up the aisle.

I went after her.

Conor was already at the door.

He held it open with his shoulder and didn't say anything.

I went past him close enough to smell cold air and coffee on his shirt.

Behind me, I heard Garner say, in that pleasant, reasonable voice, "Let her go. We'll fix this."

Sabina was in the loading dock behind the building, in the cold, with her back against a dumpster and her hands in her curls.

It was the first of November, and she had no hat.

"Hey," I said. "Hey. Breathe."

"I swabbed because you were scared," she said.

"I know."

"I bought us both those kits as a joke for your birthday. I never opened mine. I put it in a drawer."

She was crying hard now, the way she did at funerals and sad commercials.

"Why didn't you?" I asked.

"Because I didn't want a stranger's family to come and take me away from the only one I had."

I knew who she meant.

She meant Ma, who had raised her in New Britain and died when Sabina was nineteen, and she meant me.

"Rhea," she said. "They said I'm their daughter. I don't even know their names."

"Donald and Constance," I said.

"They're going to want me to be somebody else."

"They're not going to want that."

"You were the one who was supposed to be theirs," she said. "I was supposed to be in row two clapping."

I put my arms around her, and she held on to my navy dress with both hands.

I wasn't crying.

I had expected to, and I wasn't.

What I felt was flat and cold and strange.

I'd had two weeks of a room with a window seat.

I'd had a woman who called me her girl.

And I'd had my best friend, who was still here, holding on to me in an alley.

"Twenty-five percent," Sabina said into my shoulder. "What does that mean? Is that bad?"

"Garner said it was what a daughter looks like when the sample's old."

"That's not how it works," she said.

"I don't know how any of it works. I wait tables."

She laughed once, wetly.

"The call came from his office," I said. "Not the TV station. His investigator rang my phone two weeks ago and said I should expect to be contacted."

"Why would that matter?"

"I don't know yet."

A door banged behind us.

The loading dock door opened.

Garner Harrowgate stepped out into the cold with his coat over his arm and not one hair out of place.

He looked at Sabina kindly.

Then he turned that kindness on me, and it left his face.

"Miss Quillan," he said. "The guest suite is needed by noon. A car is waiting at the front for your things."

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