handsome man. Even though he was — whoo — really good-looking. Very hot. What guys called eye candy when talking about women. In her line of work, there weren’t many good looking guys. None, actually. She would have sworn she was immune to handsome faces, only turns out she wasn’t, not at all. She just hadn’t been exposed to many. Not in real life anyway. Most handsome men she’d seen were up on a screen.
“Hope.” He carefully kept exasperation out of his voice but it had to be there.
“Hmm?” His eyes were light blue with narrow striations of dark blue.
“Hope. Kyle? DNA?”
Oh God, there she was again, mooning. At least she wasn’t drooling. Was she?
She surreptitiously ran a hand over her mouth, which — yes, thank you God — was drool-free.
Kyle. DNA. A dead friend. A lifetime of lies. Danger built right into her DNA. That was enough to bring her down to earth.
“Yeah. Kyle came right over and showed me the DNA results.” If she closed her eyes she could see the scene. Kyle, his friendly, droopy face unusually sober and serious, sitting on the edge of her couch in her pretty, tiny apartment, right under her original Star Wars poster. Another story of hidden genetic connections. Luke Skywalker’s father had turned out to be a monster. And hers?
“And … who were they?” Luke said and she realized she’d gone into another fugue state.
She needed to sharpen up, focus. Focus is what would keep her alive.
“Well, not my parents, for one.” Luke straightened a little at that. “I was right. There was no genetic connection at all between me and my parents. Both of them were mostly Slav. Polish and Russian extraction, Kyle said. I am of English extraction with some Irish thrown in. But that’s not all.” She plucked at an afghan that was hanging over the back of the couch. It was made of cashmere and touching it soothed her. “Not only were they not my parents, they weren’t man and wife, either. They were siblings.”
Luke blinked, which she was sure was an expression of great astonishment for him. He didn’t seem to be someone who wore his feelings on his sleeve. She gave a wry smile.
“Yeah. They were brother and sister.” Hope held up a hand. “That isn’t quite as skeevy as it sounds. Or maybe it is, I don’t know. Not sure of much of anything these days. But I never actually saw them kiss or even hug. They slept in separate bedrooms. And looking back, they didn’t behave like man and wife. I don’t know if they behaved like brother and sister because frankly, I don’t have any experience in that field, but they were more like partners in an endeavor than — than a couple. So clearly, that endeavor was to be Neil and Sandra Ellis and to pretend to be my parents.”
Luke’s eyebrows drew together in a scowl. So expressive it was as if he’d spoken.
“Yeah.” She had felt the same way.
“So if they were — were pretending to be your parents, there was a reason.”
“Uh huh. I think they were paid to pretend to be my parents. Like a job.”
He thought it over. “Well, this is so weird, why not? What led you to that conclusion?”
“Like I said, they always had plenty of money, but I never saw them work. Ever.”
He leaned forward a little, the frown still there.
Yes, that was exactly what she felt like too. The more you knew about the situation, the more you felt like you’d fallen into a rabbit hole.
“And the adoption angle?”
Hope nodded sharply. “Yeah. That’s the only thing that makes sense. I have looked — and trust me when I say I’m pretty good at looking, it’s what I do — and I can’t find anything. Though I don’t have the resources to hack into the systems of every adoption agency in America and — given that I seem to be English and Irish — abroad. I spent a sleepless forty-eight hours searching every adoption agency I could find, including some in England since apparently that’s my main heritage, with no luck at all. But in the meantime I asked Kyle to attack the problem from another angle.”
“You asked your friend to match your DNA to as large a database as possible.”
She nodded. “By this point he was as intrigued as I was.” She smiled a little. “I think part of that was that he was an Ashkenazi Jew and his family could trace