“You are wasting ninety-nine dollars on that stupid box, Arthur,” my wife said, tossing her keys on the kitchen counter.

She was sorting through the bills, not even looking at me. I was holding the little blue cardboard box I had ordered online.

I was forty-five. I was adopted as a baby. I just wanted to know where my ears came from. I wanted some medical history for our two teenagers.

I didn’t expect the email that arrived on Tuesday morning.

I was sitting in my office at the school district warehouse. I sort inventory schedules. It is a quiet job. The email header simply said my results were ready. I clicked the link.

There were 247 DNA relatives. Most were distant. Names I did not recognize. But the very first match at the top of the list made me stop breathing.

Predicted relationship: Parent or Uncle.

The last name was Vance.

That is my wife Sarah’s maiden name. It is a rare name around here. There are maybe forty families with that name in the entire state.

My mouse hovered over the profile. A male. Born in 1955. Died in 2019.

When the photo loaded, my brain just shut down. I knew that face. I had sat next to him at Thanksgiving dinner for fifteen years. I was one of the pallbearers who carried his casket into the wet grass when he died.

It was her Uncle Robert.

I remember staring at the gray pixels of his eyes on my screen. The room felt very hot. I could hear the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.

I need to explain something about my family. My adoptive parents were good people. They drove an old brown Buick LeSabre with rust along the bottom of the doors.

They clipped coupons. They didn’t have much. My dad worked at the grain elevator until his back gave out.

But Sarah’s family was different. They were the Vances. They owned the local lumber yard. They had a cabin on the lake.

Uncle Robert was the patriarch. He was the one who paid for the big family cabin trips. He was always smiling. He had this silver-plated pocket watch with a scratched glass face that he always wound with a little clicking sound.

On my thirtieth birthday, he had handed me that watch.

“You’re a good man, Artie,” he had said. He patted my shoulder. His hand was heavy. “You’re more of a Vance than you know.”

I had felt so proud back then. I thought he was just being a kind, welcoming uncle-in-law. Now, the memory made me feel sick to my stomach.

I sat in my office for two hours. I couldn’t do any work. I kept looking at his birth year. 1955.

I was born in 1981. Robert would have been twenty-six.