Page 2 of The System

“I’ll let you know. I have training this whole week, and it’s exhausting. I have to get through that first before they actually let me do my job. Let me text you later this week, okay? I’m still getting this place set up and will probably be running errands anyway.”

“So, you’ll be too exhausted to have lunch with me but not too exhausted to run errands?”

“Diego, I need to go now. I haven’t had dinner yet, so I need to eat something before I call it a night,” Kieran lied.

“All right. Fine. Just let me know about the weekend. I need to know before I make plans myself, obviously.”

“I will. Thanks for letting me know and for the offer.”

“Good night, Kieran.”

“Night, Diego,” she replied and hung up.

Calls like this one still came at least once a week, but when she’d first left, there had been daily texts, too. Sometimes, Diego would remind her about something she’d remember on her own. Other times, he’d ask if she wanted to talk over coffee or a meal. She figured she should at least be happy that instead of every day, it was only once a week now because that probably meant that soon, they’d be once a month, which, she felt, would be more appropriate for exes trying to find their way toward friendship.

Kieran went into her kitchen and decided she’d make herself some popcorn as a snack since she’d eaten dinner around six but was still hungry. She added the extra melted butter that she preferred, along with probably way too much salt, and sat down in front of the TV in the living room. She wouldn’t mess up her controllers with butter hands, so she just turned the TV on, deciding to find a movie to watch while she was finishing her snack. Then, she’d either play something or work on the app she’d been building on the side for the past few months.

The idea had been her friend’s, who wasn’t technical, so Kieran had offered to, at minimum, create her a viable product that would get her friend started, and Ruthie, in turn, had agreed to give her a percentage of the business should it take off. Building an app from scratch wasn’t hard for Kieran, but Ruthie kept evolving her idea. One day, it had two features. The next, she wanted a third added. Then, there also needed to be a way for people to pay through app stores, despite Ruthie initially telling her that she hadn’t planned on launching with in-app purchases. Every day, it seemed, there was a new text from the woman with a different request. While Kieran enjoyed building things and didn’t mind adding new features, she also wished she had the full scope of the project from the start so that she wouldn’t have to scrap parts of the code or make copious changes to it. It gave her something to do in her evenings that wasn’t work-related, though, and since she now lived over an hour away from her friends and family, she could use fun things to do from afar that still kept her connected to all of them.

She found herself in bed later that night, working on the app, when an email came into her personal account. It was from DNAdiscovery.com, too, which was weird that it landed in her personal inbox and not her work one. Then, she remembered that this was part of her benefits package. DNAdiscovery was a company that, by swabbing people’s cheeks, collected their DNA so that it could get analyzed before a database of now hundreds of thousands of samples could spit back out their relatives and ancestry. While the company already offered more than some of its competitors at the moment, part of what Kieran had been hired for was to expand their feature offerings by building the things the new product managers said they’d need, and for being an employee, she could have a test kit sent to her home and get the results back, all completely free of charge.

It was actually something that had intrigued her about working there. Of course, nothing had stopped her from using their service in the past, or one of the others that offered it, for that matter, but she’d never given it much serious thought until after her dad died. When he’d gotten sick, he and her mother had finally sat her down and had revealed to Kieran that she was adopted.

It had been the biggest shock of her life because she’d always thought she looked like the perfect combination of her parents. She had her father’s sandy brown hair and her mother’s green eyes. They hadn’t told her earlier because it hadn’t ever been needed. She’d been lucky not to have any major accidents or injuries that would’ve required a blood match, and she hadn’t had any serious illnesses that could’ve required an organ donation or, at minimum, an awkward and difficult conversation. That day, though, they’d sat her down and told her the truth. She’d been abandoned. No one knew who her biological parents were. There was no record of her birth, so there had been no birth parents to find.

She’d taken a while to deal with that and had spent a few months in therapy, but when her dad had gotten worse, she’d stopped going to help her mom and had focused on him. Then, after he’d died, Kieran had certainly wondered if she’d find anything out using one of these sites, but she hadn’t wanted to hurt her mom, who was still dealing with her husband’s death. It had felt like trying to find someone who hadn’t raised her might cause the woman more pain, and Kieran hadn’t been interested in that at all.

As she stared at the email, which required her to click a button and enter her address to have the test kit shipped to her, she wondered what might be revealed if she swabbed her cheek. Maybe she’d find out who her birth parents were. Maybe she had siblings, aunts, uncles, or cousins out there. Deciding she’d do it and not tell her mother about it just yet since it might not turn into anything, and she still worried about hurting her, Kieran clicked the button and entered her information. The kit would arrive in two days. The testing itself had the option to be expedited for employees upon request, which she requested, and it would only take a few weeks.

She closed her computer and thought about it. She might have more family out there, people who might not even know that she existed all this time and that she had no idea existed, either. Kieran wondered what they’d look like, what they’d be like, what they all did for a living, and if they lived close. She could picture herself meeting someone for coffee and laughing over old family stories. Of course, she’d have to message those people first, telling them that she was their relation, but she could already envision learning more about them and asking them about her birth parents. Not being able to do any of that just yet, though, she wrapped up for the night and tried to get some sleep.

CHAPTER 2

Kieran had been putting Diego off for three weeks, and he’d insisted that while he’d originally told her that the boxes and the bat bag could stay there indefinitely, he had since changed his mind. The very same basement that they’d never used for anything more than storage, despite her being interested in having her own at-home office, Diego was now going to redo as a game room with a small movie theater. Making junior partner had given him a bigger paycheck, and that meant more changes like this were probable. He might even go into a full mid-life crisis a little early and get a bright and shiny new car or a motorcycle. She also wouldn’t put it past him to get a boat when the nearest big body of water was well over an hour away from him. That body of water was coincidentally located in the town one over from where she’d just moved.

“Oh, God… What have I done?” she asked herself as she pulled up to the house. “He’s going to get a boat just to have an excuse to visit me.”

She pictured him buying a boat, telling her all about it, and asking if she wanted to take it out for the weekend. Eventually, Kieran planned to buy a house, and if she did that, she could also see him asking if he could park the boat in her driveway just so it was easier for him to use it. He’d offer to teach her how to hitch it to her car and drive the thing so that she could take it out on her own if she wanted to, and the next thing she knew, he’d be trying to get her to move back in or ask if he could stay at her house sometimes.

“Hey,” Diego said with a wide smile as Kieran got out of her car. “Thanks for coming by. I would’ve brought it over, though. It’s not all going to fit in your car.”

“It’s fine. I’m sure I can just repack it and fit it all in,” she said. “The trunk looks small, but it’ll fit the books.”

“Well, that’s silly.” Diego pushed the screen door open and ushered her through it. “You’ll spend time repacking it here and then have to take ten trips when you get there.”

“Home,” she corrected after entering the house and looking around the entryway. “When I get home. And it’s not a big deal.”

“Right,” he muttered.

The house hadn’t changed much since she’d moved out. He still had the same framed photos of them leading up the staircase, despite their divorce being final and her telling him time and again that she wasn’t coming back. Kieran hadn’t asked him to take down the photos since this was technically his house now, but she wondered if she should since they were still up. The table by the door still held his keys, and she nearly tossed her own right there next to them out of habit as she’d done for nearly a decade. She held on to them, though, and tucked them into the front pocket of her jeans.

“Want some coffee?” Diego offered.

“No, I’m good. I’m not staying, remember? I need to get home. I have some work to do.”

“On the weekend?”

Kieran walked around the main staircase into the kitchen, pulled open the door to the basement, and said, “One-hundred-percent you were working in your office before you saw my car pull up.”

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