Page 15 of Tangled Up In You

“Well, you can be tired tomorrow night after you finish your chores. You’ve been studying on a cushy sofa in a library all week, I expect you to be rested up.”

Nodding, she scooped up a forkful of casserole. “I am, sir, absolutely. I had the best week, too. You would not belie—”

“I was saying we need to get the last of the winter greens from the hothouse,” Gloria cut in. “The front garden needs to be cleaned out and prepped before we take you back on Sunday. That’s on top of your other chores. If you can’t handle it then maybe—”

“I can handle it,” Ren assured them, nodding at her plate and recalibrating how the weekend would go. If there would be no discussion of school tonight, there would certainly be no discussion of long-lost relatives.

Gloria put a hand on her arm. “I’m just trying to help bring you back home. Mentally. Spiritually. I sense that you’re getting more and more tied to that place, but here is what matters.”

Ren smiled gratefully and tried to mask any panic before it bled into her expression. And then she forced her attention back to her plate, because the longer she stared at her mother across the table, the more aware Ren became that this new suspicion buzzing in the air had just changed something in her forever.

CHAPTER EIGHT

REN

Sunday night, back in her dorm room bed, Ren stared at the ceiling, hating the gnawing panic that festered in her stomach. Her parents had dropped her off two hours ago, and she’d been immobilized with anxiety. The longer it ate away at her insides, the more she knew it wouldn’t go away until she’d seen for herself whether Audran had handed her the correct results.

She couldn’t wait until morning. After the profile in the student paper, Ren felt like she was living under a spotlight. She couldn’t dig into this with an entire classroom of her peers there to witness her realization that her genetic history wasn’t what she thought it was. The last thing she needed was to be a spectacle and for any of this to get back to Gloria and Steve somehow. No, if her world was indeed falling apart, she wanted it to happen under the cloak of darkness, where she’d be completely alone.

She sat up and, without thinking about it too much, pulled on her boots. Moving on instinct, she walked to the door, opened it, headed down the hall and out of the dorm. Every step loosened the tight feeling in her chest.

But as she walked across the quad and her panic eased, her rational mind peered back in. What on earth was she doing? Gloria would be furious. Furious about the test, yes, but Ren was also out after curfew. How many times had her parents said that bad stuff happened to people when they were out doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing? The world was full of robbers and murderers, and hadn’t Steve and Gloria kept her safe until now? Almost twenty-three years old, and she’d never been robbed or murdered once! What more proof did she need that they were right about everything?

Wispy fog curled around her ankles and sent a shiver up her body. She picked up her pace, speed walking the rest of the way across the wet, dark lawn.

The brick front of Hughes Hall curved gently alongside a wide flower bed. In the day, the sun reflected off the front windows, but at night they seemed to hold shadows at every turn. To give certain students access to labs, the front doors were unlocked, but even so, Ren braced the door carefully until it closed with barely a whisper and tiptoed past the open spaces filled with groups of red, gray, and dark blue modular sofas. A surreptitious peek into classrooms and labs as she passed showed the occasional student hunkered over a desk or lab bench, but otherwise the building seemed mostly empty.

The front doors might have been unlocked, but unfortunately, the handle to Audran’s lab wouldn’t budge.

If her friend Doug the Custodian had been here now, Ren had zero doubt she could convince him to let her inside. A forgotten worksheet, she could say, or maybe a lost wallet. But with the halls empty and seeming to stretch a mile in either direction, she’d have to rely on a different skill set.

Back home, they couldn’t run down the street if they needed a duplicate key, and even if they could, the idea would be so far out of her parents’ comfort zone that it almost made Ren laugh into the dark just thinking about it. An extra key? Steve would say. For who? The person who’ll rob us blind? If they lost a master, that was it. Thankfully, the three of them were better lock pickers than any cat burglar you’d find in the movies. Tension wrenches, rakes, screwdrivers, and even nails—all came in handy. She once broke into the locked barn using a hoof pick and some twine from the hay bale.

Unfortunately, Ren had none of those things in her backpack, so the paper clip around her Intro to Mandarin packet and the pin in her hair would have to do.

Straightening the bobby pin, she slipped it into the lock and then slid the straightened paper clip in to find and carefully lift the tiny pins inside. It took some patience, a few stops and starts, but with just the right amount of pressure, the mechanism started to give, and the lock turned over with a satisfying click.

With one last furtive glance up and down the hall, Ren slipped inside and closed the door behind her with a near-silent tick. The lab was near black, illuminated only by fog-obscured moonlight streaming in the windows, and her heart galloped like a wild beast in her chest.

Pushing off the door, she headed to the computer farthest from the window and booted it up. While it loaded, she snuck to the cabinet where their active in-class work was kept.

Again, the door was locked.

“I’ll do extra chores over spring break.” Ren whispered her penance into the empty room, putting the bobby pin and paper clip to use one more time. The flimsy lock on the cabinet opened easily. Shuffling through the papers in the tray there, Ren found a folder with her name on it and carried it over to the computer to read by the screen’s light.

Inside the folder was the piece of paper with the preliminary data linked to her sample ID. Digging into her backpack, she pulled her notebook out, flipping it open to the sticker she’d put there with the ID number. Ren stared down, numb, at the identical sequence of numbers there.

Audran hadn’t accidentally handed her someone else’s data.

She closed her eyes, trying to explain it away. Maybe her sample had been mixed up before she sealed it, or switched in transit, or replaced with someone else’s at the testing lab. But Ren knew the odds of this highly validated system failing in such obvious ways were slim.

After dimming the screen as low as it would go, she loaded the genotyping software and then hesitated, knowing she’d have to create an account to access more information. She wondered if this was a step too far. Did it matter anymore? She’d already committed a handful of crimes and broken twice as many of her family’s rules. Stopping now wouldn’t change any of that. Besides, Audran would have them do this in class tomorrow anyway.

Carefully, Ren created a profile with her ID number, giving a fake name and her address as the student dorm. The software loaded with an overwhelming number of options: ANCESTRY REPORT, DNA RELATIVES, BLOOD & BIOMARKERS, TRAITS, and RESEARCH. Ren’s mouse hovered over the DNA RELATIVES tab; then, with shaking hands, she clicked the link, typing her information when prompted, and checked the box not to allow others to view her profile.

Hopefully whoever her paternal match was had been more generous with his own information.

As expected, there was nothing on the maternal side of the tree, but just beneath her generic pink profile image was a cartoon of a man’s profile in blue and the words 99.9999% paternal match.

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