Page 69 of Echoes at Driftwood Cottage

She ended the call. “That was the nursing home. Gwynn passed away in her sleep earlier tonight a little before eight o’clock. The horrible thing is I don’t feel anything for her, Daniel. I’m trying. But the truth is I haven’t focused on her for a very long time. She wasn’t much of a mother.”

“I know.”

“Will you go back inside and tell Brent in case the nursing home doesn’t call him? I can’t talk to him right now.”

“Sure. Are you okay?”

She stared into his eyes. “I don’t know how I feel. Right now, I’m just numb. Processing all this is hard.”

He squeezed her hand. “You stay here. I’ll be right back. Maybe you should take a couple of days off.”

“No way. I need to stay busy. Otherwise, I might just go stark raving mad.”

Going crazy wasn’t an option, Rowan realized after getting back home. While Daniel started dinner, she checked the mailbox, looking for her genealogy report. When she spotted the envelope with the lab’s return address, she tossed everything else on the dining table and ripped open the results in anticipation, only to receive another gut punch.

Daniel came around the corner to catch the look on her face. “What’s wrong?”

“This can’t be right.”

“What?”

“This stupid genealogy report that I paid a fortune for says I have no immediate matches. They checked multiple generations, but all they got was a partial DNA match, which translates to nothing but distant cousins. Very distant. This means that I have no living relatives. How can that be? How often are these things wrong?”

“We’ll try another lab, find one with access to other databases.”

“This says they tried several of the most popular ones. See?”

Daniel scanned the sparse details. “It just takes one database, Rowan, one result that comes from a relative somewhere in the world uploading a sample that matches back to you. Patience is the keyword here. You can’t give up.”

Her shoulders slumped. “Why does everything have to be so hard?”

He took her shoulders. “Don’t look at it like that. Your circumstances might be unusual, but it doesn’t mean you won’t get answers. Look at how much we discovered today.”

“The same day Gwynn died,” she muttered. “It’s just that I expected more out of this lab. I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.”

“We’ll get there. I promise you. After the kind of day we’ve had, you look exhausted. You need to eat something and get some rest. I made some potato soup. Comfort food.”

“From scratch?”

Daniel wrapped his arm around her and steered her toward the kitchen. “I’m a handy guy to have around.”

She touched his cheek. “I’m noticing that. I keep waiting for your dark side to surface.”

He chuckled. “I’m afraid my dark side only comes out during a full moon. Apart from risk-taking and rash decisions every now and again, you’ll have to work harder for it to pop out.”

She elbowed him lightly in the ribs. “I don’t want to bring out your dark side. I like this side just fine.”

“Then don’t let my soup get cold.”

When they reached the kitchen, he pulled out a chair for her before heading to the stove where a pot simmered on the burner.

She caught a whiff of the soup, making her stomach growl in response. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten. “That smells amazing. It doesn’t look lumpy like my potato soup. That’s a compliment by the way.”

“An old southern family recipe,” Daniel said, dropping a ladle in the pot and scooping up the contents into her bowl.

“What other kind of southern dishes do you have in your arsenal?”

“Ask my grandmother. She’ll be here in less than eighteen hours. And she loves to cook.”

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