The Harbor Glen library always looks smaller than I expect.
From the outside, it’s just another brick box on the slope down to the docks, wedged between a boutique pet groomer and a café selling six-dollar lattes to women in Mercer Foundation fleece vests. Inside, though, the air changes. It smells like paper, dust, and the faint tang of disinfectant that drifts up from the hospital on the hill, layered over someone’s floral hand lotion.
I slip in through the side door off the back road lot, not the main entrance that faces the manicured town center. Harbor Glen built an entire lane system so residents could bypass traffic and tourists. The Mercers like options that keep them out of sight.
My ribs protest when I pull the door shut. The staircase bruise blossomed overnight into a plum-colored stripe along my side. Every inhale reminds me how close I came to breaking on marble. Every exhale reminds me the house is not content with warning shots.
The front desk librarian glances up, recognizes me, and gives that particular Harbor Glen smile: polite, curious, measuring where my name might land on donor walls in a few years. I wave and move straight toward the back stacks, where the town’s gossip can’t hear over the hum of the heater.
Riley told me “quiet corner, genealogy stacks, second floor.” I climb the narrow interior staircase, grateful for the solid wooden steps under my boots. No carpet to slide, no chandelier overhead, just old pine stained dark and nicked by decades of shoes. My hand lingers on the rail longer than necessary.
On the second floor, the noise drops to a thick hush. Only the rattle of the heating vents and a distant page turning break it. Shelves rise on either side of the aisle, spines faded, call number stickers curling at the edges. A small sign, hand-lettered, reads: LOCAL HISTORY / FAMILY RECORDS.
“You look like hell,” someone murmurs from behind a microfilm cabinet.
I jump, hand flying to my chest.
Riley emerges from the shadows in a dark beanie and a weather-beaten army jacket, a messenger bag slung crosswise. She moves with coiled efficiency, like she already mapped the exits. The overhead fluorescent flickers once, then steadies, casting her face in flat light that does nothing to soften the purple crescents under her eyes.
“Hi,” I say, because anything else feels too big. “Good to see you too.”
Her gaze drops automatically to my side when I wince shifting the bag on my shoulder. “You okay?”
“I didn’t die on the stairs,” I say. “So that’s a win.”
Her eyes sharpen. “You weren’t joking about them escalating.”
I shake my head and nod toward the corner table by the window, as far from the elevator as we can get. “Let’s sit. Before someone recognizes me and asks why I’m not at the country club brunch.”
We cross the carpet in silence. Outside the narrow window, I can see the Long Island Sound, gray and restless, slapping against the docks. The cliffside mansions line the ridge beyond, houses perched in a neat row above the law. The hospital sits on its own rise, glass and steel catching the winter light, Mercer crest etched into the donor wing.
I drop my bag next to the chair and lower myself carefully, testing how much my ribs will tolerate. Riley doesn’t sit right away. She scans the floor, checking who’s within earshot. An older man sleeps over a biography in the far corner; two teens with earbuds scroll on their phones near the computers. No one close enough to catch words.
Finally, she slides into the chair opposite me.
Up close, her cheeks are wind-chapped, freckles standing out more than they did under the streetlamp at the docks. There’s a coffee cup near her elbow, the cardboard sleeve crumpled from being squeezed. The lid bears a lipstick print, but the color looks worn, like it’s been on for hours.
“You texted that you had an idea,” I say. “Terrifying first line, by the way.”
“You’re the one who keeps going back into the house that’s trying to kill you,” she says. “Don’t critique my risk tolerance.”
A short breath leaves me that might be a laugh. “Fair.”
Riley reaches into her bag. “Okay. Don’t freak out.”
“Promising start.”
She pulls out two flat cardboard boxes, white with clean branding and barcodes. They look plain enough, the kind of thing you’d order on a whim between streaming shows. On the side, a generic logo nods toward double helixes and smiling people on park benches.
DNA testing kits.
My throat dries out. “You brought merch.”
“Contingency plans,” she says. “And answers, if we want them.”
She places one box in front of me, one in front of her, like she’s dealing cards. The cardboard scrapes softly against the wood. My palms feel suddenly damp.
“I’ve done this dance with records,” Riley says, tapping my box lightly. “Birth certificates, hospital logs, adoption files. We both know those can be edited. Destroyed. Replaced.”
I picture Mrs. Donnelly’s chimney, paper curling inward, names vanishing in fire.
“Paper can lie,” I say.
“Genes don’t care about donor plaques.” Riley leans forward, elbows on the table. “They don’t care what story Evelyn Mercer told anyone. They don’t care about second daughter trusts or staged accidents. They just… are.”
The simplicity of that terrifies me more than the staircase did.
I cross my arms over my chest, then wince and uncross them. “What exactly are we testing for?”
“Two main things,” she says. “One, whether I’m biologically related to any Mercers. Specifically Robert, since we’ve got some public relatives in the system for comparison, and people like him love those ancestry sites for fun. Two, whether you are tied to them. Or to someone else who intersected that hospital in the late nineties.”
Her gaze stays steady on mine. “Case 14B,” she adds quietly.
The library air feels thicker all at once. I know I’m sitting upright, but my body feels off-center.
“Even if I’m not biologically a Mercer,” she continues, “I grew up in the blast zone of what they built. I’ve got motive to keep going either way. You, though… your entire identity intersects that hospital and that foundation at the exact time they were running off-book adoptions. Your mom’s work history, your birth records, Case 14B. This test could tell us if the Mercers are in your blood. Or if someone else in their orbit is.”
I stare at the box. The edges blur for a second.
“And if it says yes?” I ask. “If it pops up ‘congratulations, you’re welcome to the family that loosens tacks on your staircase’?”
Riley’s jaw tightens. “Then they don’t get to deny you exist anymore.”
“They can try,” I say. “They’re very good at denial.”
“Courts like DNA,” she says. “Juries like DNA. Journalists love DNA. It cuts through a lot of Mercer spin.”
“And if it says I’m not theirs at all?” I ask. “If I’m just… some other baby from some other story they corrupted?”
“Then we follow that line,” she says. “We look at matches to women who gave birth at Harbor Glen Memorial around your date. We figure out whose kid went missing on paper while you went home in their place. Either way, it points to a crime.”
I picture the Mercer hospital wing lit up on the hill. The crest embedded in glass, the holiday banners about “Light the Harbor, Heal the Future.” I’ve watched Evelyn cut ribbons there, smiling for cameras, talking about saving premature infants and underwriting genetics research.
“You’re asking me to let a lab define who I am,” I say.
“No,” Riley says. “I’m asking you to let a lab prove who lied to you.”
The words land like a small earthquake, subtle but far-reaching.
I pick up the box without opening it, just to feel the weight. It’s absurdly light. This tiny thing could redraw entire family trees, could pull knots tight around court cases and trusts and public statements. Could salt the earth under the Mercer crest.
“Walk me through what happens,” I say. “All of it. No surprises.”
Riley exhales, some tension leaving her shoulders. “Okay. We activate these under aliases from a burner email. We don’t upload any family trees, any real names. The lab processes the cheek swabs, spits out raw data, and their in-house matches. But we’re not relying only on them.”
She pulls a folded printout from her bag: a list of third-party tools and a name circled three times. “I’ve got an independent geneticist I trust from another case,” she says. “Out of state, no ties to Harbor Glen, no Mercer money in her pipeline. With your consent, we send her the raw data. She works up relationship probabilities privately, so we’re not tied to any platform subpoenas initially.”
“And the part where I wake up and I’m not the person on my driver’s license anymore,” I say.
“That part’s already in motion,” she says quietly. “The Mercers started rewriting you before you could crawl. The question is whether you want to watch them do it or take the pen back.”
I look down at my hands. There’s a faint coffee stain on my finger from last night, where the tray tipped. A tiny brown crescent near the nail. The bruise along my ribs throbs against my sweater with every breath.
“There’s a version of this where the test says I’m nothing to them,” I say. “No Mercer blood, no legal tie. Just a glitch in their system.”
“There’s also a version where you’re exactly what they were afraid of,” Riley says. “A living receipt. Or where I am.”
“Or both,” I say.
“Or both.”
The thought lands between us, heavy and electric. Two women sitting in the genealogy section, quietly considering that their cells might be embossed with the same family crest that hangs over the hospital and the estate.
“You’re not scared?” I ask.
“Terrified,” she says. “But I’ve spent my whole life being haunted by unknowns. ‘What if’ has eaten enough years. I’d like real ghosts now, thanks.”
That pulls a surprised laugh out of me, sharp and short. “Real ghosts. Great. Love that.”
She softens a little. “Look. If you say no, I keep working. I keep building the case off paper and testimony and whatever digital trails Evelyn failed to scrub. You don’t owe me your DNA. You don’t owe anyone that.”
The relief I expect doesn’t show up. Instead, there’s a dank little hollow in my chest where it should be, like the absence of something I already decided on without admitting it.
I think of my mother, standing in our old kitchen, hands wrapped around a mug, voice shaking when she said she once considered signing me away. I think of Mrs. Donnelly’s fire and the file I wasn’t fast enough to save. I think of the car sliding on black ice toward the guardrail. The banister under my fingers last night, the tacks blinking up at me from the wood.
The Mercers are already rewriting me into a cautionary tale. Unstable, ungrateful, accident-prone.
If I let fear keep me from this, I’m helping.
“If I do this,” I say slowly, “the results could blow up everything. Daniel, my mother, any chance of pretending this is just about them and not me.”
“There’s no clean version,” Riley says. “There’s the lie that keeps you safe for a while and the truth that might hurt everyone. The Mercers built an empire on trading other people’s kids between those two options.”
The paradox sits there: people who funded neonatal wings and adoption scholarships also falsified death certificates. Love and harm braided into one rope, thrown down to some and used to hang others.
“You’re good at this,” I say. “Making it sound noble.”
“It isn’t noble,” she says. “It’s necessary. For me, at least. For you… that’s your call.”
I run my thumb along the box seam until the cardboard gives. The lid pops open with a soft crack.
Inside, everything is clean and organized: two plastic vials with clear fluid, a pair of sterile swabs in sealed packets, an instruction booklet with smiling stock families, and a return mailer already printed with a distant lab address. It all looks so harmless.
“You okay?” Riley asks.
“No,” I say. “But keep going.”
She opens her own kit, mirroring my movements. “We don’t eat or drink for thirty minutes beforehand, which I’ve already screwed up, so I’ll wait to swab until after we’re done talking. You’re good; your text said you hadn’t had breakfast.”
My stomach growls on cue. “Perks of living in a house where meals double as public relations events.”
“Step one,” she says, nodding at the swab. “Open it, rub it along your cheek for thirty seconds, don’t touch anything else with it, then drop it in the vial. Seal, shake, done.”
Thirty seconds. My identity converted into a brief chore.
My fingers tremble as I tear open the packet. The swab looks like a tiny white flag.
“Last chance to walk away,” Riley says quietly.
I think of Evelyn’s hand on my wrist last night, fingers cool and controlling, voice smooth as she said accidents happen in old houses by the sea. I think of my husband kneeling on the stairs, trying to explain away loose tacks with expanding wood and old carpet. I think of the missing infant, Case 14B, reduced to a code while my life went on.
“No,” I say. “I already passed that exit.”
I slip the swab into my mouth and drag it along the inside of my cheek. The texture is abrasive, cotton scraping against tender tissue. The taste is faintly sterile, like biting a bandage. I count in my head to thirty, focusing on the numbers instead of the fact that each second scrapes loose cells full of answers I’m not ready for.
At twenty-nine, my eyes sting.
Thirty.
I pull the swab out, careful not to brush my lips, and slide it into the vial. The plastic clicks into place. Riley watches my hands, not my face, giving me that small privacy.
“Now cap it,” she says quietly.
The cap twists on with a firm, final snap. I feel it in my ribs.
“Congratulations,” she says. “You just turned your body into evidence.”
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “You’re not great at the comforting metaphors.”
“You don’t need comforting,” she says. “You need out.”
I shake the vial gently, mixing whatever stabilizing solution waits inside. Tiny bubbles cling to the cotton tip, rising slowly.
“We mail them from here?” I ask.
“Not from Harbor Glen,” she says. “I’ve got a detour planned. Back road to the next town over, drop them in a random box. Fewer eyes, fewer cameras feeding into Evelyn’s pet projects.”
Of course the Mercers fund surveillance studies. Of course their crest shows up in the university lab that researches predictive analytics for community safety.
“You trust the mail more than the hospital,” I say.
“The post office never pretended to be your family,” she says.
That lands with more force than I expect.
I tuck the vial back into the box and slide it into the pre-addressed envelope. The paper feels rough under my fingertips, edges sharp. Once I let go of this, the process moves beyond me. Labs, servers, genomes lined up like soldiers, marching toward conclusions I can’t negotiate with.
“Riley,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“If this comes back and you’re not related to them at all—no Mercer DNA, no trust, no name—what then?”
She considers, eyes drifting to the window where the hospital lights glow against the gray sky. “Then I still know they used kids like me to build their brand,” she says. “I still know they pressured your mom. I still know they burned records. I don’t need their genes to hold them accountable.”
She brings her gaze back to me. “But if I am theirs… then they’re going to wish I wasn’t.”
A shiver runs through me that has nothing to do with the draft leaking from the window.
“And if I’m theirs?” I ask.
“Then you’re standing in the middle of their crime scene and sleeping in their house,” she says. “And they’ve already tried to erase you twice. I don’t think they get a third chance.”
The envelope crinkles in my grip. That’s the real point of no return, not the swab.
I flatten the flap down, pressing the adhesive with my thumb until it sticks.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s mail our ghosts.”
Riley’s mouth twitches. “There she is,” she says softly. “The woman who walked into a cliffside fortress and started asking where the bodies are.”
I slide the sealed envelope across the table toward her. “Don’t make me sound heroic,” I say. “I’m just tired of ducking under chandeliers.”
“You’re allowed to be both,” she replies.
We stand in quiet sync, my ribs reminding me of every step the staircase tried to steal. As we head back toward the stairs, I glance once more at the window. The hospital on the hill glows against the winter sky, a beacon funded by people who think they can rewrite bloodlines.
In a few hours, my cells will be on their way to a lab outside their reach.
For the first time, the question isn’t whether the Mercers will keep their secrets.
It’s what I’m going to do when the double helix shows me where I really belong.