The DNA Matched My Cousin, Not Me, So They Kept Me Anyway novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Attachment
Conor's father lived in a brick row house on Asylum Avenue.
At seven on Saturday morning there was a nurse's car out front and a light on in the study.
"He doesn't sleep," Conor said, turning off the truck. "He'll be awake and he'll be rude. Don't take it personally."
"What's he going to be rude about?"
"Me. Mostly."
Inside, the front hall smelled of coffee and radiator dust.
A hospital bed stood in the study under a portrait of a dark-haired woman laughing at somebody off the canvas.
The old man in it was thin and gray, with an oxygen tube in his nose and Conor's gray eyes, sharper.
"Mr. Pascoe," I said.
"You're the girl," he said. "Sit down. You'll want to."
I sat.
Conor stayed on his feet and took a manila folder from the bedside table.
"Dad's been up since three," he said. "I asked him last night to pull the Harrowgate correspondence from the file. The firm's copied on everything the family office sends. Garner's assistants have done it for thirty years."
"And?"
"And Garner has never learned that the firm's general mailbox is printed."
He opened the folder on the quilt.
The first page was the release, the one from the green room, with my signature and Conor's under the letterhead.
Conor turned it over.
Stapled to the back was a single sheet, typed, headed INVESTIGATOR SUMMARY, with a date in the corner: October 16.
"This is what was stapled behind your release," he said. "I signed the front. I never turned it over."
His voice was perfectly level.
I took the sheet.
The first paragraph was a few lines about a genealogy site and an alert, and the name of Constance Harrowgate's account.
The second paragraph said: Match: Rhea Quillan, age 24, Hartford. Shared DNA with C. Harrowgate: 25 percent.
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