It started as an innocent holiday joke around a mahogany dining table in Greenwich, Connecticut, on Christmas evening.
My mother-in-law, Eleanor, was an amateur genealogist who had spent the last twenty years tracing the Sterling family bloodline back to seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Every Christmas, Eleanor gave themed gifts, and that year she bought eight commercial 23andMe saliva testing kits for everyone at the table: her two sons, their wives, and the older grandchildren.
Everyone laughed and started spitting into the little plastic vials between dessert and coffee. Except my husband, Garrett.
Garrett was thirty-six, an executive vice president at a commercial real estate firm, handsome, athletic, and loved by everyone in our gated community. When his mother handed him his box, he pushed it gently across the linen tablecloth with a relaxed smile.
"Mom, you know I don't trust these commercial genomics companies," Garrett chuckled smoothly, taking a sip of his vintage Port. "They sell your biometric profiles to private health insurers and third-party data brokers. Next thing you know, our life insurance premiums triple because of an arbitrary genetic predisposition marker. I'll pass."
Eleanor looked hurt, but Garrett was such a master of polite deflection that nobody pushed him. When we packed up our things that night, I noticed Garrett had quietly tossed his
unopened test kit into the kitchen trash can beneath the wrapping paper.
I don't know why, but while Garrett was outside loading the car, I reached into the bin, pulled the box out, and slipped it into my purse. I figured he was just being his usual over-controlling, privacy-obsessed self, and I wanted to add his ancestry profile to our seven-year-old son Leo's family tree.
The next morning, while Garrett was in the shower, I swabbed his cheek with the spare sterile cotton swab from the kit—he had left his toothbrush and travel kit on the counter with enough fresh saliva—sealed the biohazard pouch, and dropped both our boxes into the blue post office collection box downtown.
I forgot all about it for six weeks.
Our life on Willow Brook Lane was idyllic by any suburban standard. We lived in a five-bedroom colonial with a wrap-around porch and a tennis court. Two houses down from us lived Harper.
Harper had been my closest friend since our college days at Cornell. Four years earlier, when Harper's fiancé allegedly abandoned her during her third trimester of pregnancy to move back to London, she was devastated and broke. Garrett and I had stepped in like family.
We helped Harper find the rental cottage at the end of our
cul-de-sac. When Harper gave birth to her daughter, Lily, I held her hand in the delivery room. Garrett stood in the hallway with coffee and flowers.
Over the next four years, Lily became a fixture in our home. She called Garrett 'Uncle Bear' because he would carry her on his shoulders around our backyard pool. Garrett was endlessly generous with Harper; whenever her roof leaked or her car needed an alternator, Garrett called his private contractors and paid the bill before Harper could even cry about it.
He even established what he called the 'Willow Brook Neighbor Fund'—a private tax-exempt education trust that he claimed his corporate partners used to sponsor underprivileged local children. Through that trust, Lily attended the same elite twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year Montessori preschool as our son.
I used to brag to my sisters about how extraordinary my husband was. In a world full of selfish men, Garrett was the saint who took care of everyone.
Then came Sunday, February 14th.
It was Valentine's morning. Garrett had left at dawn for what he called an 'emergency commercial zoning walk-through' in White Plains. I was sitting at our kitchen island drinking Earl Grey tea while Leo was eating pancakes and watching cartoons.
My phone chimed with an email notification from 23andMe: 'Your Family DNA Relative