‘Not as often as I should have, sorry. I’ve been busy. Anyway, what was I saying? DNA tests. Yes, my friend Brita discovered a half-brother she didn’t know about.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep. No idea he even existed. She thought he might be a cousin at first because that’s what the website said but it all came out when she confronted her dad about it. It turned out he’d slept with someone six months before he got together with Brita’s mum and she fell pregnant. She didn’t tell him about the baby and she brought their son up alone.’

Jenna let the words sink in as she gently moved Juliet’s arm out to the side, watching her face for any sign of pain. ‘Why did the website say he was her cousin?’

‘I’m not sure. Weird though, isn’t it?’

Somehow, Jenna managed to hold it together long enough to finish the session but she snatched up her phone the moment Juliet had dressed and was out of the door and typed a question into Google. And there it was, in black and white: If the amount of shared DNA between half-sisters falls into the range of expected DNA between first cousins, then there is a chance that they will be labelled as first cousins on the match list.

She rang Fran’s number but it went straight to voicemail so she hung up and called the ancestry hotline instead. It was a mistake, it had to be – some kind of screw-up in the lab. That’s what Fran would have told her if she’d managed to get through to her.

But that’s not what Barbara, the customer services lady with the sympathetic voice told her. She said the tests were ninety-nine percent accurate. It was very unlikely that a mistake had been made.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Tom says as Jenna finishes her story. ‘I can’t begin to imagine how shocked you must have been. Did you ever talk to your sister about it? Fran? Is that her name?’

‘Yes, I did but she was abrupt and dismissive and I just … It wasn’t the right time. She wasn’t the right person to tell anyway. She can be quite abrasive and I knew she’d go barging in, all guns blazing, demanding answers. She’d get Mum and Dad on the defensive.’

‘So you told them yourself?’

‘I tried to talk to Mum. Dad had a stroke six months ago. It knocked him for six, affected his memory, his speech, everything really. He’s still re-learning how to walk.’

‘A stroke? That must have had a big impact on the family.’