Yet highlighted in bright yellow at the very summit was Wyatt Jenkins. The predicted relationship clearly stated that the two boys were…

…full brothers.

I stared at those two words until they seemed to come apart on the page. Underneath them, the report listed an amount of shared DNA close to what geneticists expect from full siblings.

The website cautioned that some close relationships can overlap and should be verified by other means. Wyatt had underlined that caution, too.

He wasn’t a boy who had mistaken a suggestion for a verdict.

“Mom,” he whispered. “There was another baby, wasn’t there?”

My name is Evelyn Jenkins. For eighteen years, I’d practiced saying one sentence without crying: I have one son.

It was the sentence people expected after meeting Wyatt, and over time it had become almost possible to believe.

I lowered the page. “I gave birth to two boys.” Wyatt pulled back as though I’d struck him.

“You told me I was an only child.”
“I believed you were the only one living.”

The kitchen clock clicked forward. Outside, someone rolled a trash bin across the sidewalk, making a sound so ordinary that I hated it. “They told me your brother died the morning you were born,” I said.