The DNA Matched My Cousin, Not Me, So They Kept Me Anyway novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lilies
The producer says off-air that the DNA match is with Sabina in row two, and Rhea walks down to her best friend and puts the lilies in her arms.
The red light over camera two went dark, and the producer walked out of the control room with a lab envelope.
I was still smiling.
I had a bouquet of white lilies in my lap and a studio audience watching me.
I didn't know yet that the cameras had stopped.
The producer didn't go to the family.
He bent down to the lawyer's son beside me and said it low.
"The match is with Sabina. The girl in row two."
I turned my head.
Sabina sat in the second row in her green coat, both hands over her mouth.
She had made these lilies at six o'clock that morning at the flower shop where she worked.
She had kissed my cheek and said, "Go be a princess, I'll be the loud one in the back."
Beside me, Conor Pascoe went very still.
He was the lawyer's son, thirty-two, in a charcoal suit that had been slept in.
He had been put next to me for the paperwork, and for sixteen days he had said maybe forty words to me.
Now his hand came flat against my back, warm through the blouse the Harrowgates' stylist had picked.
"Rhea," he said. "Look at me."
I looked.
His eyes were gray and not at all sure of anything.
"Whatever you do next," he said, "I'm standing next to you."
On my other side, Mrs. Harrowgate had her fingers on my wrist.
She had held my wrist like that every day since the first morning.
She had called me "our girl" over soup, and cried in the car, and put me in a room with a window seat.
For sixteen days I had been the daughter she lost twenty-four years ago.
I had quit the diner for it.
I had told my boss I wouldn't be pouring coffee anymore, because I was a Harrowgate.
"What does that mean?" Mrs. Harrowgate whispered. "What did he say about Sabina?"
Nobody answered her.
The producer straightened up and spoke to the whole couch, fast.
"Thirty seconds. We run the card as written, or we don't run it. Somebody decide."
Behind the couch, a pleasant voice said, "Run it."
Garner Harrowgate stood in his gray suit with one hand on the back of his brother's chair.
He smiled at me.
"The family wanted this on television," he said. "Let her read it as written."
Mr. Harrowgate's pill case rattled in his vest pocket.
His hand shook as he pressed it flat to his chest, and I saw how thin he'd gotten in two weeks of hoping.
The audience was being told to sit.
A woman with a clipboard counted down from twenty.
I thought about the card.
Whatever it said, it said it about me.
In ten seconds a camera would swing to my face, and four million people would watch a waitress find out what she wasn't.
I could sit very still and take that.
I had taken worse from customers.
But Sabina was in row two with her hands over her mouth and tears running down into her fingers.
In the green room, at the last minute, Sabina had taken a swab too.
"If you're doing it, I'm doing it," she'd said. "So you're not alone."
She had no idea.
She was sitting there thinking she had come to clap for me.
"Ten," the woman with the clipboard said.
I stood up.
The lilies came with me, and Conor's hand slid off my back and then came back, steadying my elbow without a word.
Mrs. Harrowgate said, "Rhea, sit down, sweetheart."
"Five."
I went down the three steps from the couch in the heels the stylist had picked.
The audience made a sound, a whole room of people drawing in air.
The host half rose from his chair.
I walked up the aisle to row two and held out my free hand.
"Rhea," Sabina said. "What's going on?"
"Come with me."
"I don't understand."
"I know," I said. "Come anyway."
She took my hand.
Her fingers were ice.
I led her down the aisle, past the cameras and the man with the headset.
We climbed the three steps to a couch that had gone silent.
Mr. Harrowgate was looking at her.
He was looking at her curls, and her small chin, and the shape of her mouth.
Mrs. Harrowgate had both hands pressed to her face.
"Two," the woman with the clipboard said.
The red light came on.
I put the lilies in Sabina's arms.
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