Читать книгу From Mistake To Millions - Andrea Laurence - Страница 9

Prologue

This couldn’t be right.

Jade Nolan studied the genetic test report she’d just received in the mail. The DNA kit had been a Christmas gift from her younger brother, Dean. He’d gotten it for everyone in the family this year. He thought it would be fun to see what parts of the world they’d come from. They were fairly certain of the family’s Irish and German heritage, so there weren’t going to be many surprises.

But the words Jade was looking at were a surprise and then some. They were actually a shock.

“Jade? Are you okay?”

She looked up from the paper in her hand and stared blankly at her best friend, Sophie Kane. They were hanging out drinking wine and watching their favorite show together just like they did every Tuesday. But the minute Jade looked at the report, the evening had taken a sharp, unexpected turn.

“No,” she said with a shake of her head. “I’m not okay.”

How could she be okay? According to the report, she wasn’t closely related to any other users in the company’s database. Considering that she’d been the last of her family to mail in her DNA sample, that wasn’t possible. Both her parents and her brother had submitted their DNA weeks before she had. They should be showing under the family section of her report. And yet they weren’t.

Never mind the fact that her DNA showed she wasn’t Irish and German. She was coming up English, Swedish and Dutch. She’d seen her brother’s report and they didn’t align at all.

“What does it say?” Sophie pressed. She set down her wine and leaned in to lay a comforting hand on Jade’s shoulder. “Tell me, honey.”

Jade swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat. She couldn’t speak. In an instant, a lifetime of unfounded doubts had rushed into her mind. Years of being the family misfit. Insecurity about her physical differences. Jokes about being the milkman’s daughter, since she was blonde with dark brown eyes, and the rest of her family had dark, almost black hair and green eyes. The jokes were all too real now.

No matter how many times her mother had assured her that her grandmother was a blonde, no matter how many grainy old pictures were hauled out to prove that her willow-thin frame came from her father’s family, it didn’t help. Her grandmother’s hair had been a dishwater blond in her youth, not Jade’s pale, almost platinum color. The family in the old pictures were poor and undernourished, not naturally slim like Jade, with her ballerina’s body.

Jade had always felt like the odd one out. Now she had the cold, hard evidence to prove what she’d known all along. She was not a Nolan.

She stood up suddenly and the report slipped from her fingers, falling to the floor. Jade didn’t notice.

“I think I’m...adopted.” She was finally able to say the words aloud, but they sounded foreign to her ears.

Adopted. The reality of it was like a fist to the gut. Why had her parents kept this from her? She was almost thirty years old. She had married and divorced. When she and her ex-husband, Lance, were discussing children, her mother had even told her stories about her pregnancy with Jade. About how her father had fainted in the delivery room. Now Jade realized it was all a lie. An elaborate, complicated lie.

But why?

She didn’t understand what was going on. But she would get to the bottom of it one way or another.