I squeezed my eyes shut and put my forehead into my hand. The roller coaster was never ending.

A part of me was relieved she was going to leave. The other part was scared for what would happen when she was gone. Because how long could she live like this? How long until her options ran out and she was too old to bounce from man to man and job to job? What would happen to her if she got injured or came down with a chronic illness or the games she used to manipulate people stopped working?

She would fall into my lap.

My whole life I was waiting for her to come back for me. And when she finally did, it wouldn’t be for me at all. It would be for lack of other options. It would be for her.

She wouldn’t try therapy. She wouldn’t accept help even when it was paid for in full and being handed to her on a plate.

Resentment bloomed in my chest. I don’t think it had ever been so clear to me before that Mom was responsible for her own circumstances. I always gave her an out. I always argued in her favor. She had bad credit, she had no support, no money, no help.

Only this time she did. And she didn’t want it.

“Did you ever get the results of the DNA test?” Maddy asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“Yeah,” I said glumly.

“You did? What did it say?”

I sniffed and sat back again. “I’m Irish and German. A little of a lot of things.”

“And relatives?”

“I didn’t look,” I said.

“Do you want to look?” she asked.

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.