6.

Timothy was so kind and helpful. It turns out he is an adoptive father himself and understood where I was coming from. But he had no idea who I was or whose child I was.

Timothy started asking his mom questions. She is really interested in genealogy and Ancestry, so she was eager to help as well. Needless to say, I got very little actual work done on these days. I spent lots of time researching Timothy and his family once he and his mom started giving me names and information. I was able to search a bunch of public family trees and start finding similar names to my DNA list. I uploaded my Ancestry data to GEDMatch to see if there were any more connections there. (There weren't.)

Timothy and I emailed each other for two days straight. I searched and searched and calculated and hypothesized about where I might fit into this giant puzzle. I'm a biologist, and I am really interested in pedigrees, evolution, and genetic inheritance, so that was a big help. But it just didn't make sense - I had all these cousins, but I couldn't figure out how I was related. Where was my missing piece? At the end of the second day - the very last email of the night - Timothy told me he had a half brother.

Something didn't feel right. Something didn't feel right at all. As soon as I read that sentence, and re-read that sentence, and then read it again, my heart sank. I had such a bad premonition, but it couldn't be. I could be his half-niece. Is that even a thing? Does that exist? I thought about it all night. I pored over all my notes again. Right before I shut off my phone for the night, I googled the percentages of DNA you share with family, particularly a half-uncle. You share 12.5% of your DNA with your first cousin. You share 12.5% of your DNA with a half uncle. This could be it. I had to ask the question I feared the most: what is your half brother's name?

As soon as I got to a computer the next morning, I emailed Timothy that exact question. I had his answer pretty quickly: Hank. My heart started to shatter into a billion pieces. My next email was simple - do you know anyone in this picture? Along with that message, I forwarded the picture my "grandfather" had sent to me back in 2011.

Timothy's answer broke what was left of my heart that morning. It was along the lines of "that's funny, how do you have a picture of Hank?"

Those people that my parents said lied to me - they were my grandparents. It wasn't a lie. Hank was my dad and Anne was my mom and there was nothing I could do about that. I now had the genetic confirmation that Sue had asked me for all those years ago. I turned off all the lights in my office and cried.