Chapter 7 - Results
The results came back four days before Christmas, in an email neither Claire nor Sophia opened for nearly an hour after it arrived, each woman staring at the notification on her phone from opposite ends of town, neither quite brave enough to be the first to know.
It was Sophia who finally called Claire.
"I can't open it alone," Sophia admitted, when Claire picked up. "Would you — could we open it together? On the phone, I mean. At the same time."
"Yeah," Claire said, surprising herself with how readily the word came. "Give me one second."
She stepped out onto the porch, phone pressed to her ear, snow falling soft and steady over Larkspur Lane, the porch swing Michael had built creaking faintly in the wind. Through the window behind her, she could see Emma and Jack sprawled on the living room floor wrapping the last of the presents, Jack's tongue poking out in concentration as he attempted, and failed, to fold a corner of wrapping paper neatly.
"Okay," Claire said. "I'm ready."
"Me too." A pause. "On three?"
"On three."
They counted together, and Claire opened the email with hands that were not quite steady, scrolling past the clinical preamble to the result itself, printed in plain, unglamorous font, utterly indifferent to the weight of what it confirmed.
Probability of half-sibling relationship: 99.7%
Neither woman spoke for a long moment. Claire heard Sophia's breath catch on the other end of the line, a small, wet sound that might have been a laugh or might have been the beginning of tears, or — more likely, Claire thought, feeling the same thing rise in her own chest — both at once.
"Well," Sophia said finally, voice thick. "There it is."
"There it is," Claire echoed.
"I don't know what to do with this feeling," Sophia admitted. "I expected relief, or grief, or something I recognized. Instead I just feel — enormous. Like the world got bigger and smaller at the same time."
Claire understood exactly what she meant, though she couldn't have explained it to anyone who hadn't lived it. The world had gotten smaller, because a stranger was now, undeniably, family — the distance between them collapsed by biology into something inescapable. And it had gotten bigger, because somewhere out there was an entire history Claire had never known to look for: a grandmother in Baton Rouge she would never meet, cousins and second cousins scattered through Louisiana, a whole shadow family tree that had been growing, invisible, alongside her own for thirty-four years.
"Can I ask you something?" Claire said.
"Anything."
"Do you want this? Actually want it — a sister, I mean, not just the confirmation of a fact. Because facts and relationships aren't the same thing, and I don't want either of us to feel obligated toward each other just because a lab in Ohio said we're supposed to be."
There was a long silence on the line, long enough that Claire began to wonder if she'd overstepped, if the question itself had been a kind of betrayal of whatever fragile thing had been growing between them since Bellamy's diner.
"I've thought about it every day since I found the letters," Sophia said finally. "And here's what I keep coming back to. I grew up an only child. I used to lie awake as a kid, wondering what it would be like to have a sister — someone who'd known me my whole life, who'd share memories with me nobody else could touch. I never got that. I got wonderful parents and a happy childhood, but I never got that specific thing. And now, at thirty-four, it's being offered to me in the strangest, most complicated way imaginable, wrapped up in an ex-husband and two nieces and nephews I already loved before I knew they were mine to love in this particular way. So yes, Claire. I want it. I want you as my sister, not just as a biological footnote. I just don't know if you can want the same thing back, given everything else standing between us."
Claire looked through the window again, at her children wrapped in tinsel and wrapping paper, laughing at something Jack had said, the particular golden chaos of a family two days before Christmas.
"I think," Claire said slowly, testing the words as she spoke them, "that I've spent three years building a wall around my heart so thick that nothing new could get in — not love, not grief, not family. And I think somewhere in the last week, without meaning to, you found a door in that wall I didn't know was still there."
"Is that a yes?" Sophia asked, and Claire could hear, even through the phone, the smile trying to break through her voice.
May you like
"That's a yes," Claire said. "Merry Christmas, sister."
On the other end of the line, Sophia Reyes began, finally, unmistakably, to cry — and this time, Claire knew without asking, it was entirely from joy.
