I told myself a hundred reasonable things in about ten seconds. Lots of people share last names. Lots of people are forty-six. The condition is rare but it isn’t one in a million. I was being crazy.

I was a tired mom of a sick kid and I was inventing things.

I called records anyway. I told myself I was calling to report the mix-up. That’s still what I was telling myself when the woman picked up.

I gave her my name. I gave her Hannah’s name. I read the donor’s name off the page, slow, like I was being careful not to hear it out loud.

There was a pause. Not a long one. Just long enough for me to know something was wrong with how she was about to talk.

“Ma’am, I’m going to need to transfer you,” she said.

I asked her, plainly, “Can you just tell me one thing. The donor and my daughter. Are they related?”

I shouldn’t have asked. They’re not allowed to say things like that on the phone. But I think I sounded like a person about to fall off a roof, because she went quiet for another second and then she said it.

“The donor and your daughter share the same biological father.”

I dropped the folder. Not in a movie way. My hand just opened. The pages went all over the kitchen floor and one of them slid under the fridge, and I remember being annoyed about that, which is maybe the stupidest thing my brain has ever done.

I sat down on the tile. I didn’t pick anything up for a while.

I want to say I started crying right away but I didn’t. I just sat there.

Hannah was at school. David was at work. The dishwasher kept running.

After a while I crawled around and gathered the pages. I lined them up on the table the way you do when you’re pretending you’re still in charge of something.

Then I got to the last page. I had skipped it before. It was a photo, paper-clipped to the back, the kind of low-quality printout the hospital makes when they’re identifying a donor.

I knew the woman in it.

I knew the woman in it because I took the picture.

It was Rebecca. She came to our Thanksgiving last year. David introduced her as “an old family friend who’s going through a rough patch.” She brought a pumpkin pie. She helped me clear the table. Hannah liked her because she let her wear her bracelet.

In the photo she was standing in our living room. By our tree, the fake one we put up the day after Thanksgiving every year because David likes a long Christmas. She was smiling.

She was holding David’s hand.