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“Two months?” Sloan asked with wide eyes.
“That’s if you go through the normal channels.”
Sloan raised her eyebrows. “You have a way to get around the normal channels?”
“Of course. It’s what I do. I’m one of the lead genealogists for Your Lineage dot com.”
“How does that help me?”
“I can expedite things for you. We could have your DNA profile up and running in, say, a week. And then I can walk you through the whole process of how you create a family tree, use your DNA profile to connect with distant relatives, and trace your lineage back to the days of yesteryear.”
Sloan pouted her lower lip, thinking of her parents and what they would say about her digging into her ancestry and locating her birth parents. Then she thought of Dr. Cutty, and her warning about procrastination. She finally nodded.
“Okay, I’m in.”
CHAPTER 5
Raleigh, North Carolina Wednesday, July 3, 2024
THE FOLLOWING MORNING SLOAN STOPPED AT HER PARENTS’ HOUSE before she was due at the morgue to meet the second-year fellow she had been assigned to. She parked in the driveway and walked through the front door.
“Hello?”
With an orthodontist for a father and a dentist for a mother, both in the same practice, her childhood mornings had always been controlled chaos. The breakfasts Sloan saw on television growing up, of bacon and eggs served in the kitchen nook, while dad drank coffee and read the paper, were nonexistent in the Hastings home. Those picture-perfect television mornings were replaced instead by a quick bowl of cereal or a breakfast bar as Sloan scooped up her backpack and climbed in the back of her parents’ SUV for the ride to school before Dr. and Dr. Hastings hustled off to the office.
“Hello?” she yelled again from the front foyer.
“In the kitchen, honey,” she heard her mom say.
“Hi,” Sloan said as she walked through the doorway.
“What are you doing here?”
Dolly Hastings stood at the kitchen counter and buttered a piece of toast. She wore green surgical scrubs. There had never been ties or blouses or scenes of her mother hurriedly slipping into high heels on the way out the door. In the Hastings home all Sloan ever remembered her parents wearing to work were scrubs and gym shoes. From day to day, the color changed but not much else.
“Just thought I’d stop by to say hi.”
“My BS radar is going off,” her dad said on the way down the back staircase. Todd Hastings, too, wore scrubs—although his were light blue and covered with braces and teeth.
Drs. Dolly and Todd Hastings, of Hastings Family Dental & Orthodontics Center, were not shy about their disappointment that Sloan hadn’t followed them into dentistry.
“Your first week of fellowship, and you stopped by to say hi?”
Sloan smiled. “Yep. Hi Dad.”
“You haven’t just ‘stopped by’ since medical school. You only come over when you want something. Money? I thought this forensics fellowship paid you decently.”
“It does not. But I don’t need money.”
“Ignore your father,” her mom said. “He’s overly pessimistic since we’ve become empty nesters.”
“That was, like, ten years ago.”
“It hasn’t gotten any better.”
“I looked it up,” her dad said. “Fellows make about seventy grand a year. You’d be making three times that by now if you’d joined the practice straight out of dental school.”
Sloan smiled. “Oh, Dad, you keep forgetting. I didn’t go to dental school.”
