Even so, she hadn’t imagined that her otherness had anything to do with genetics. A lot of people felt as though they didn’t fit within their families. She’d simply concluded herself to be the odd one out.

Until now.

I received the results from the YourHeritage DNA test kit you gave me for my birthday,” Leah told her mom on Sunday evening. “You’re not listed as my mother and no Everly or Montgomery relatives are listed as matches.”

Silence multiplied between them.

Leah had been gnawing over this for two days—two days!—while she’d waited for Mom to return her call. She’d practically given herself arthiritis in the knees thanks to the time she’d spent kneeling and praying.

“That’s ridiculous,” Mom stated emphatically. “I’m your mother.”

“Not according to my DNA.”

As soon as Leah had answered her phone, she’d shut herself into her car inside her one-car garage so Dylan couldn’t overhear. In sharp constrast to Leah’s surroundings, her mother was currently in Guinea, working on an agroforestry project. On the other end of the call, Leah pictured orange earth, palm trees, and huts. Mom had likely clothed her sinewy body in safari khaki. Her curls, which matched Dylan’s, would be zigzagging from her head, and her close-set eyes and long face would be pinched with consternation.

As usual, contact with her mom submerged Leah in a complex mix of resentment, love, and resignation.

“Two weeks before your due date, I started bleeding,” Mom said. “My back hurt. My belly hurt. We rushed to the hospital, and they diagnosed me with placental abruption.”

This information was not revelatory. Leah had gone through a phase in elementary school when she’d been obsessed with her origin story and had peppered her parents with questions about her birth and herself as a baby. “The placenta had pulled away from your uterus,” Leah said.

“Right, which is dangerous. They worried that you might not be getting enough oxygen, so they put me under and performed an emergency C-section. I have the scar to prove it!”

“I’ve seen the scar.”

“Of course you have.”

“I’m trying to reconcile all of that with the only logical explanation for my DNA results, which is that you adopted me.”

“You can’t always trust logic.”

“On the contrary, the wonderful thing about logic is that you can always trust it. So I began to wonder . . . What if your baby didn’t survive the placental abruption? And, in your grief, you adopted me?”

“I most certainly did not adopt you, Leah. The emergency C-section saved you. They placed you in my arms shortly after I regained consciousness.”

Leah remained quiet.