The website said Full Sibling, ninety-nine percent confidence, and Patsy Callahan laughed out loud, because she was an only child.
She laughed so hard she had to set her coffee down. Then she read it again, and stopped laughing.
"Nolan," she called toward the living room. "Come look at this thing. I think your computer's broken."
The DNA kit had been a joke. Her grandson had given it to her in March, for her seventy-ninth birthday, wrapped in the Sunday comics.
"So you can find out if we're really Irish, Gram," he'd said. "Or if Great-Grandpa was making it all up."
Patsy had spit in the little tube at the kitchen table while the whole family watched and laughed. She'd mailed it off the next morning and forgotten about it. Six weeks later, an email came, and Nolan, who was nineteen and home from college, set it all up on her laptop and showed her where to click.
There was a pie chart, mostly green for Ireland. There was a map. And there was a list of relatives, hundreds of them, cousins and second cousins and people she'd never heard of in places she'd never been.
At the very top of the list, above all the cousins, was one name.
Ann Feeney. Troy, New York. Full Sibling.
Nolan leaned over her shoulder and read it. He didn't laugh either.
"Gram," he said slowly. "That doesn't mean half sister. Full sibling means same mother and same father."
"Then it's wrong."
"These things are pretty accurate."
"Then it's wrong, honey," Patsy said. "I'd know if I had a sister."
Patsy had lived in Halsey Falls, Massachusetts, her whole life. She'd been born in the hospital on Prospect Street in 1948, raised in the yellow two-family house on Canal Street, married Mike Callahan at Sacred Heart, and worked as the secretary at Halsey Falls High School for thirty-six years. She knew half the families in town and most of their secrets.
She'd been the only child of Jack and Peg Riordan. Her aunts said so. Her mother said so.
Jack Riordan had worked at the paper mill for forty years and died in 1987. Peg had lived another twelve years after him, small and quick and strict, with a laugh that could fill a church hall.
She'd been a good mother. Firm and kind and very private.
Patsy sat at her kitchen table that night after Nolan went to bed and thought about her mother for a long time.
There had always been a few small things.
The locked hatbox on the shelf in her mother's closet, which Patsy wasn't allowed to touch. Her mother had left it to her in the will, with the key, and Patsy had put it in her own closet in 1999 and never opened it, because some things belonged to the dead.
The way her mother went to the early Mass alone every April 9. Not Easter, not a holy day. Just April 9, every year, in her good coat, and she'd come home with red eyes and make pancakes and never say a word about it.
And her parents' wedding picture, which said June 1947 on the back in her mother's handwriting. Patsy had been born in March of 1948.
She'd always thought it was a nice story. Her father home from the Army after the war, married at last, a baby a year later.
She'd never thought to ask what had happened before the wedding.
The next morning, there was a message waiting on the DNA website.
Patsy didn't open it right away. She made her coffee.
She fed the cat. She called her daughter, Kathleen, who lived twenty minutes away in Westfield, and told her the whole thing.
Kathleen was quiet on the line for a moment.
"Mom, be careful," she said. "There are a lot of scams on those sites. People pretend to be relatives. They want money."
"It's a DNA test, Kathleen. You can't fake spit."
"You can fake a message," Kathleen said. "Just don't give anybody your bank information. Promise me."
Patsy promised.
Then she sat down at the laptop, put on her reading glasses, and clicked on the little envelope the way Nolan had shown her.
The message was short. It had been written by someone who'd typed it slowly and carefully, and maybe rewritten it a few times.
Dear Patricia,
My name is Ann Feeney. I am eighty-one years old. I was born on April 9, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Springfield, Massachusetts, and adopted when I was eleven days old.
I had a good family and a good life. I am not writing because I need anything.
In 2022, the state changed the law and let adopted people see their original birth certificates. Mine said my mother's name was Margaret Sullivan, age 19, of Halsey Falls.
I found out she married a man named John Riordan the next year, and that she died in 1999. I was too late to meet her.
Then I took this test. And it says you are my sister.
Not my half sister. My full sister.
I have been looking for you for fifty years. I don't want to hurt you or change how you remember her.
Please don't be angry with our mother.
Ann
Patsy read it three times.
April 9, 1946.
She took off her reading glasses and set them on the table. Then she got up, and walked down the hall to her bedroom, and opened the closet, and reached up to the top shelf for the hatbox she hadn't touched in twenty-eight years.