Page 88 of What Goes Around

Ashley

I read the message a dozen times before hitting send.

The reply came sooner than I expected.

Their message was warm, hopeful, but cautious, understandably so. They had an attorney in the U.S., someone who had handled American matters for them in the past. He coordinated everything—DNA kits, chain-of-custody documents, shipping, verification.

One week later, the results came in.

They were my grandparents.

Their health was too poor to travel. But my uncles, my uncles, flew out instead.

We met at a restaurant one town over. Neutral ground. I didn’t want Dad or Marissa anywhere near this.

When I walked in, both men stood so quickly their chairs nearly toppled.

They stared at me like I was a ghost resurrected.

Then the older one, Étienne, covered his mouth with his hand and began to cry openly.

“You… you look so much like her,” he whispered. “Mon Dieu… c’est incroyable.”

I was grateful I had taken French in school. My accent was terrible and my vocabulary thin, but I managed a soft, hesitant, “Je suis très heureuse de vous rencontrer.”

We spoke mostly in English, but every now and then I forced out a clumsy French sentence.

Their eyes lit up every time I did.

They were patient with me. Gentle.

And in that moment, I made myself a silent promise.

I would polish my French until I could speak to them fluently. To speak to them in her language. To reclaim a piece of the woman I never got to know.

They told me everything they knew.

I learned about my mother.

She had been brilliant. Quiet. Kind. Stubborn. Their baby sister.

My mother’s murder was still an unsolved case. Every year, they called the Berkeley Police Department asking for updates. Nothing ever came of it. But recently there had been a news segment: homicide rates were down, detectives had more bandwidth, and old cold cases were being reassigned and reopened.

“It has been seventeen years,” one uncle said softly.

“Evidence fades. Witnesses forget. But DNA… technology moves forward.

There is always hope.”

What I didn’t expect, what I never could have imagined, was the truth my uncles revealed next.

My mother had set up two trust funds for me.

Her family hadn’t been wealthy in the billionaire sense, but they were comfortable, old French money threaded through a modest but successful family company my uncles now ran. Their combined assets hovered around ten million euros.

My mother had been the same. The kind of woman who built safety nets in advance. Who thought ahead. Who prepared.

Right after I was born, she’d established two trusts: