Just for the Summer(93)

Justin peered at me.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Maddy leaned in. “It’s your birthday. I’d say today is a great day to let people know you exist.”

“Mom always told me I wouldn’t be wanted,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” Maddy said. “She also lies a lot.”

I let out a dry laugh. Then I looked at Justin. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s a big decision,” he said. “You can’t undo it once you look. It’s possible that it might cause problems for someone.”

I sensed a but. “But?”

“But it’s been twenty-nine years—almost thirty really, if you count the nine months she was pregnant. Chances are if she’d been seeing a guy who was married, they could be divorced, or one of them or both of them are dead. It’s an old transgression. It happened a lifetime ago.”

“But Mom said he didn’t want kids.”

“You’re not a kid,” Justin said. “You don’t need raising. You don’t need money. I think a lot of people who don’t want kids don’t want the responsibility. You’re not a responsibility at this point.”

I bobbed my head. “True.”

“I think it would be worth looking to see if you have any siblings or cousins. To find out where you came from,” he said. “I can’t imagine not knowing who my dad was. Plus the health history is important. What if there’s something that runs in the family that you should know about?”

I looked at Maddy. She nodded.

Any other day I probably wouldn’t have had the courage. If I wasn’t so exhausted from Mom’s breakdown, I might have had more mental headspace to overthink it and chicken out. But today I didn’t.

I took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

Maddy clapped her hands.

“Let’s use my computer,” Justin said. “The monitor’s big enough for us all to see it.”

“Good idea,” Maddy said, getting up.

We went upstairs to Justin’s room and pulled up the website and logged in. First I showed them my ancestry. Then I poked around and found the tab we’d come for. The one that said, “Participate to Find Relatives.”

I hovered my finger over it for a long moment. Then I clicked it and the page started to load.

I thought the results would be more instant. Most pages don’t take longer than a second to come up, but this one loaded for almost five minutes. Some colossal feat taking place on the other end.

My anxiety started to gnaw at me.

The extra time to think was making me second-guess my decision. I was about to make a joke about the website not being able to find any relatives for me when the page finished and the results finally popped up. My eyes landed instantly on two words, clear and in bold.

Amber Grant.

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “She ran her DNA.”

That was weird. She always told me she didn’t know our ethnicity.

I looked at the next match. A little round purple icon with the initials DG, and next to it: Daniel Grant.

And under it: Half Brother, on your mother’s side.

Maddy and Justin leaned in, reading it at the same time I did over my shoulder.

A half brother. On my mother’s side?

“How would I have a brother on my mom’s side?” I said, blinking at the screen. “She never had another baby.”

I tapped on his name and his birth year came up. My stomach twisted.

“How old is Amber?” Justin asked.

“Forty-seven.”

“According to the year he was born, she was only fifteen,” Justin said.

“Okay,” I said, licking my lips. “Okay, so she had a baby she gave up.”

“But why didn’t she ever tell you?” Maddy asked.

“Maybe it was painful and she didn’t want to remember it? Maybe it was a closed adoption?” I said.

Maddy shook her head. “Then why does he have your last name though? I mean, that’s weird, right?”

“Maybe a family member adopted him,” Justin said.

I shook my head. “I don’t have any family. Amber’s an only child and my grandparents died young. She didn’t have cousins, no aunts and uncles, nothing.”

I clicked out of Daniel’s profile and like the website was replying to what I just said, a list of names lined up under Daniel’s.

Justine Copeland.

Aunt, on your mother’s side.

Andrea Beaudry.

Aunt, on your mother’s side.

Liz Beaudry.

1st cousin, on your mother’s side.

Josh Copeland.

1st cousin, on your mother’s side.

With every name, my heart pounded harder.

“What is happening?” I breathed.

Maddy looked at me and I could see it in her eyes.

“I’m going to message him,” I said, clicking back on Daniel.

I started typing, but before I even hit send, a message from Daniel came through first. Four words that I felt my brain commit to memory forever.

Your mom is Amber?

My hands were shaking when I typed in “Yes.”

His next message said “please call me” and there was a number.