‘I’m okay.’ She sits down. ‘I didn’t think we had another session until tomorrow but Kate said I should come today, seeing as yesterday’s session was cut short.’

‘We didn’t exactly get started, did we?’ He smiles warmly. He seems happy and relaxed, as though a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. ‘Water?’ He pours her a glass and pushes it across the table.

‘Okay then.’ He sits back in his chair. ‘Let’s get back to why you’re here.’

Jenna rubs her palms over the arms of the chair, remembering the birthday party when she’d unwrapped Fran’s present.

‘It was buy one get one free,’ Fran said as Jenna looked at the ancestry test in her hands, trying, and failing, to hide her smile. How like Fran to put zero thought into her present. ‘Our results will be identical, of course, but I thought it might inspire you to visit the parts of the world our ancestors came from, like the countries in Scandinavia and Southern Europe. Or you could mark them on a map.’

Jenna thanked Fran and joked, ‘This is where we discover we’re not actually sisters.’

All her friends laughed. It was a standing joke, that either she, or Fran, was adopted. Other than inheriting their mum’s hooded eyes, they were about as different as two people could be – looks wise and otherwise.

Once she got home, Jenna ignored the test for several weeks then, one quiet weekend before payday, she dug out the test, spat into the test tube, filled out the form and sent it all off.

By the time the email arrived, saying her results were ready, she’d forgotten she’d even sent the test off, but she dutifully logged onto the website to check her results. Her genetic ancestry results were more interesting than she’d expected them to be. She was sixty-one percent British, nine percent Scandinavian, twenty-one percent Southern European and nine percent North African. She sat up a little taller in her chair. North African! Now that was unexpected. She clicked on the ‘compare family tree’ icon, the link refreshed, and there, on the screen, was her sister’s name – Frances Fitzgerald. Beneath it was one word:

Cousins.

Cousins? She half laughed. The test was useless. No wonder they’d been giving them away for free. She opened a bottle of wine, turned on the TV, and put it out of her mind.

The next day, at work, as she pushed on her client’s arm, her mind wandered back to that word on the screen.

‘Have you ever done one of those ancestry tests?’ she asked Juliet. She was a regular customer, a gardener who was suffering from frozen shoulder. ‘The DNA ones.’

‘Not personally.’ Juliet gasped as Jenna moved her arm to a different position.

‘Sorry.’ She lowered the arm. ‘Have you been doing the exercises I showed you?’

‘Mostly.’

Jenna raised her eyebrows questioningly.