Gemotions

The Ancestry test felt like a betrayal. The revelation shattered her sense of self, turning her world into a fractured landscape. The people she’d loved, who had loved her, suddenly felt distant, like characters in a play. Her hands clenched into fists.

She took apart the meticulously crafted scrapbook her adoptive mother had made of her childhood. She tore out the photographs, the carefully written captions, the memories. She gathered them up, and slowly fed them into the shredder.

Then, she replaced the family photos on the mantle with pictures of the distant relatives the DNA test had revealed. She didn’t explain.