Page 52 of How to Walk Away

My mother shook her head at Kit. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do! Because you won’t!”

My mother looked around the room, her eyes stretched and frantic in a way I’d never seen before—searching, it seemed, for some way to stop what was happening. But short of tackling Kit, there wasn’t much my mom could do. “Whatever comes of this,” my mom said to her then, “it’s all on you.”

“Oh,” Kit said, narrowing her eyes, “I think it’s at least a little bit on you.”

Everything about my mother’s expression and posture was pleading. She shook her head, like,Don’t.

Kit tilted her head, like,You leave me no choice.

At that, my mom sucked in her breath and, without another word, walked out of the room, clacking her heels, and leaving her purse and her sandwich behind.

When she was gone, I looked at Kit. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me,” I said. “Maybe we can agree that you had your reasons, and I’ll just promise not to be mad anymore.”

“You need to know.”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure I do.”

But she nodded. “It’s time.”

I sighed.

“When the results came back, they were surprising.”

I could not even fathom how something as random as this could have driven such a rift between my mom and Kit. “Surprising how?”

“You know how proud Dad is of his Norwegian-ness?”

“Yes,” I said. Anybody who’d known my dad five minutes knew that.

“Well,” Kit said, taking a breath. “This lab breaks down the results by particular regions.”

“Okay,” I said.

Kit went on. “My results came back with everything you’d expect from Mom: England, Ireland, Western Europe—exactly what we already knew. But I also have Italy and Greece.” She checked my expression.

I shrugged. “So?”

“Guess what I don’t have?Scandinavian.”

I puffed out a little laugh at the idea: Kitty Jacobsen didn’t have any Scandinavian.

But she just crossed her arms and waited for me to catch up. “I don’t haveanyScandinavian in my ethnic heritage.”

Now I frowned. I shook my head. “That can’t be right.”

“Think about it,” Kit said.

I couldn’t think about it. My brain refused to think about it.

“If Dad is fully, or at least mostly, Norwegian,” Kit said, “and I don’t haveanyNorwegian in my genetic profile…” She waited.

I shook my head. “That’s crazy. That’s wrong.”

Kit’s eyes were very serious. “It’s not wrong.”

“They must have mixed up the samples!” I said.

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