It shouldn’t have affected anything, but it did, and already she felt distanced from Josh, not as close to him as she had been before. She’d give anything in the world to bring back her old feelings, but the knowledge that they were not really related had completely changed the emotional dynamics of their relationship, and she felt simultaneously as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and as if she were floating off into space, her tether broken.

She had to bear in mind that it was only her feelings that had changed. He had known all along, so his perception of her was exactly the same as it had always been.

He loved her like a sister.

She felt guilty that she was allowing the concrete sciences of biology and genetics to affect the fragile nature of her own feelings and emotions.

“Hey,” Josh said excitedly. “I think we have something here. Look at this.”

He scooted next to her on the floor, handing her an old black-and-white photo.

Their parents were standing with her biological parents.

In front of the house.

It was everything at once, in one picture, and she stared at it dumbly, taking it all in. There was the forest behind the house: old growth redwoods, holding in darkness. The Victorian mansion: black gables and shuttered windows and wraparound porch, retaining even in the photo the aura of spookiness she so clearly remembered.

In front of the house, on the circular dirt drive, were her parents.

All four of them.

The ones who had brought her up, the only parents she knew, Josh’s parents, were smiling for the camera, their flowered paisley clothes loud even in black-and-white, a large trunk on the ground to the left of them. On the other side of the trunk, unsmiling, wearing formal clothes and equally formal expressions, were her real parents, her biological parents.

She looked closely at first her mother’s face, then her father’s, then back again. She recognized the faces now, but they engendered no response, triggered no emotion within her. She didn’t know what she’d expected—some cathartic rush of long pent-up feeling perhaps—but she wasn’t prepared for this detached, objective reaction. As she stared at the photo, her feelings were for her other parents, her adoptive parents, and for the first time since she’d learned what had happened to her, she was glad Josh’s parents had adopted her, glad she had not grown up with this sober, grimly humorless couple.

She looked over at Josh, and once again he felt like her real brother.