When she got older and her health started failing, I wanted to repay her.

I took a high-stress job as a claims manager for an insurance firm. I worked sixty hours a week. I saved every penny.

When Helen needed to go into assisted living, I didn’t hesitate. I picked Shady Pines, the nicest facility in the county. It costs four thousand dollars a month.

I paid it happily. I felt like I owed her my entire life.

But then, my daughter, Chloe, turned eighteen.

Chloe has always been the curious one in our family. She didn’t look like me, and she didn’t look like her father.

For Christmas last year, she handed me a small, square box wrapped in silver paper.

“It was on sale,” Chloe said, grinning. “Actually, with tax it was a hundred and nineteen dollars. I saved up my babysitting money.”

It was an Ancestry DNA kit.

I laughed and told her it was a waste of money. I already knew my history. My biological parents were dead. Helen had told me they were teenagers from out of state who crashed on I-95.

But Chloe insisted. She practically forced me to spit into the plastic tube.

I sent the package off in January. Honestly, I forgot all about it.

Then came a Tuesday morning in February. I was sitting at my desk at work, typing up a claim report. My phone buzzed on the desk.

An email notification from the DNA database popped up.

I clicked it, expecting to see some distant cousins or maybe some heritage percentages.

Instead, the screen showed a ninety-nine-point-nine percent match.

The label next to the match didn’t say cousin. It didn’t say aunt.

It said: “Parent.”

A woman named Gloria. Her profile said she lived in Savannah, just an hour and a half up the road from me.

I stared at the screen. My chest went entirely cold. I couldn’t draw a breath.

I thought there must be a glitch. Maybe the lab mixed up the samples.

I decided to send her a short message through the app. I kept it very simple. I just wrote that the system was showing we were a match, and I asked if she knew anything about a baby born in Brunswick in 1986.

I clicked send.

She replied in four minutes.

“I’ve been waiting thirty-eight years for this message,” she wrote.