Page 64 of What Goes Around

My gaze dropped back to the screen, ready to close it. When something beneath the main panel caught my eye.

The Relative Match Data.

Shared DNA: 26.4%

Predicted Relationship Range:

Half-aunt / Niece

Grandparent / Grandchild

Half-sibling

I leaned back against the wall and let the phone rest on my knee. My eyes traced the numbers again and again.

26.4%.

Not enough to be her child.

But enough to be family.

Some kind of family.

Marissa wasn’t my mother…but she was related to her.

If Marissa wasn’t my mother…

Then who was?

Why had I grown up in a house built on lies?

Chapter 19: The Woman in the Photo

A few days later, in the middle of the night, I slipped into my father’s office.

A thought had been gnawing at me for days: I had never actually seen my own birth certificate.

In my previous life, when I needed documents for college, Marissa had insisted on helping. She practically shoved me aside to “handle the paperwork.” I remembered how grateful I’d been, how stupidly touched that she cared.

Now I know better.

Everything she did had a purpose, and none of it was kindness.

The office smelled like leather and my fathers cologne. I went straight to the safe first. If anything important existed, it would be there.

I tried the obvious codes. Marissa’s birthday. Apple’s birthday. No luck. Of course not. That would’ve been too easy.

So I searched everywhere else, drawers, folders, the back of shelves, even behind framed certificates.

Nothing.

No birth certificate.

Not a single legal document with my name on it.

But at the bottom of one drawer, beneath a stack of documents, something caught my eye. A photograph.

It was creased, the edges worn soft with time. Folded and unfolded so many times the paper had started to tear along the lines.