Gemotions

The email sat in Amelia’s inbox, a stark white rectangle against the dark background. She knew what it contained: the ancestry results. Her thumb hovered over the mouse, her breath catching in her throat. She scrolled through Instagram, then back to the email. Her stomach churned. Maybe she could just ignore it. But the curiosity, the insistent itch of the unknown, was too strong. With a shaky click, she opened it.

The screen swam. The numbers, the percentages, meant little. Then she saw the match. A relative she'd never heard of. A name, a town, a life she knew nothing about. Amelia's hands began to tremble. Her carefully constructed world, her family history so meticulously built over the years, seemed to shift beneath her feet. She shut the laptop, the click echoing in the sudden silence of the room, as if something had just broken.