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“Not now.” He exited Kaitlin’s cottage. He shut the door firmly behind him, a period at the end of a conversation left deliberately unfinished.
A gust of cold October air blew in from the Atlantic with promises of winter. Dried leaves skittered across the gravel at his feet, accompanying to his solitary retreat.
Chapter 17
Kaitlin stared at the closed door long after Matt’s footsteps had faded down the gravel drive. The silence pressed against her eardrums like deep water, threatening to crush what remained of her composure. She pressed her palms against her eyes, but the gesture couldn’t stop the tears that leaked between her fingers.
Marissa Lane is your biological mother.
The words echoed in her mind. Over thirty years of wondering, of carrying that hollow ache where answers should have been. Years of imagining her mother’s face, her voice, her reasons. And she’d been sitting across from her just days ago, close enough to touch.
A mix of emotions filled her belly. Happiness, relief, excitement… and something more. Anger?
Kaitlin’s breath came in short and sharp. The woman who had studied her with such intensity during the interview, whose eyes hungrily lingered on her face. Those same vivid green eyes that stared back at her from every mirror.
Her mother. Alive. Living just miles away. The woman who had sold her off.
Dark oily resentment settled among the joy of discovery, poisoning it.
Matt’s face, shuttered and distant, added further toxin. So did the careful space he’d put between them. The anger and hatred for her, seething, barely controlled just beneath the surface.
She’d lost him.
The thought carved through her chest, a scalpel-sharp edge cutting into her flesh. Just when she’d found what she’d been searching for her entire life, she’d destroyed the thing that had come to matter most.
Kaitlin stumbled toward the small desk in the corner unsteadily. Her laptop sat where she’d left it that morning, a lifetime ago, when her biggest worry had been when she could see Matt again. Now the deception she’d maintained seemed pathetically small compared to the magnitude of what she’d learned.
Her fingers trembled as she opened the computer, muscle memory guiding her to the ancestry websites. She’d uploaded her DNA profile to every service available years ago, casting her genetic information into the digital void like messages in bottles, hoping one would eventually wash ashore with answers.
She’d forgotten about them during the investigation. When Matt had mentioned using genealogy to identify the victims, her mind had been focused elsewhere. The irony wasn’t lost on her now.
The first site loaded slowly. When the page finally appeared, a red notification bubble hovered over her matches tab. New connections. Her heart hammered against her ribs as she clicked through.
There. At the top of the list.
Ryan Lane. Half sibling.
The designation blurred as fresh tears filled her eyes. A brother. She had a brother.
She’d missed out on thirty-four years of having a sibling.
His profile was sparse but revealing. Male, age thirty-two, in Portland, Maine. He’d included a brief note in his bio: Searching for biological family. Half sibling adopted at birth. Any connections welcome.
Like her. He was searching too.
Kaitlin clicked through to his contact information, noting he’d made his email address public. Then, with shaking fingers, she opened a new browser tab and typed his name into the search bar.
Social media profiles populated the screen. She clicked on the first one—a professional networking site—and found herself staring at a photograph that made her breath catch in her throat.
The man in the photo looked only slightly younger than her, with dark hair and an easy smile. But it was his eyes that made her grip the laptop screen. Vivid green, exactly like her own, exactly like Marissa Lane’s. The same shade that had marked her as different from her adoptive parents’ brown eyes.
She scrolled through more photos. Ryan at what looked like a construction site, wearing a hard hat and safety vest. Ryan with a golden retriever, both of them grinning at the camera. Ryan with a group of friends at what appeared to be a barbecue, his arm slung around a woman with kind eyes and a warm smile.
He looked happy. Normal. Like someone who belonged in the world, who had never spent sleepless nights wondering why he hadn’t been enough to keep.
Kaitlin’s throat constricted, and she swallowed hard. Jealousy mixed with her delight.
What would she say to him? How did you approach someone with news like this? Hello, I’m your sister. Our mother sold me away, but surprise! Here I am, alive and on the island where you grew up!
