"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I need to know."
Rosa grinned, fast and relieved. "That's my girl. Now eat your tacos before they get cold, future science experiment."
Maya laughed despite herself — and it felt like the evening belonged to her again, Like she got to keep the quiet, the friendship, the life she'd built, all of it untouched.
Then she looked down at the bracelet, and it didn't.
Rosa nudged her knee. "Want me to stay over? Couch, bad movie, no talking about DNA."
"Talk all you want," Maya said. "Just not about —"
"DNA. Yeah. Got it." Rosa tossed her the remote. "You pick. I'll judge silently."
Maya turned the bracelet over in her palm one more time, watching the faded ink catch the lamplight, and set it back in the box — carefully, like evidence.
Chapter 6: Cheek Swabs and Coffee
The lab was on the second floor of a brick building in Cherry Creek, the kind of place with a water cooler and framed stock photos of families on the walls. Maya got there ten minutes early and sat in her car anyway, watching the entrance.
Eleanor was already inside.
"Ms. Carter," the receptionist said. "They're ready for you."
The room was small and aggressively clean. A young tech with kind eyes gestured to two chairs.
"It'll take two minutes," she said. "Open wide. Breathe through your nose."
Maya opened her mouth. The swab was quick — a scratch against each cheek, sealed into a tube, labeled with a barcode. Eleanor watched the whole thing without blinking, hands folded in her lap, and then it was her turn, and it was over.
"Anticlimactic," Maya said after a beat.
"Science usually is," the tech said, sealing Eleanor's tube beside Maya's. "It's the waiting that's dramatic."
"She's right," Eleanor murmured, and for the first time that morning her voice wobbled, just barely. "The waiting is the worst part. It always has been."
"Results in seven to ten business days," the tech said. "We'll call the number on file."
"Thank you," Maya said.
Out on the sidewalk, neither of them moved for a moment. The spring air was sharp.
"There's a coffee place two doors down," Eleanor said. "If you'd like. My treat."
Maya shrugged. "Sure."
They took a corner table. Eleanor ordered black tea, which felt exactly like her. Maya got the largest coffee on the menu.
"You don't have to be here, you know," Maya said.
"I know. I'd like to be." Eleanor folded the tea tag over the edge of her cup, precise as surgery. "How are you feeling, honestly?"
"Like I just let someone rewrite my future with a Q-tip."
Eleanor almost smiled. "That's a fair description."
"What if it comes back no?"
"Then I apologize for the intrusion, and I go back to looking." Eleanor said it simply, no drama in it. "I've been wrong before, Maya. Not about the marks — but I've followed leads that went nowhere. I know what that feels like. I wouldn't wish it on you."
Maya wrapped both hands around her cup. "Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"Whatever this says — you didn't lose a family." Eleanor's voice dropped, careful and even. "You may have found another one. But you didn't lose anything. That's not how this works."
Maya stared at her. "You rehearsed that."
"I did. All morning."
"Okay." Maya nodded slowly. "Okay, now let me say something I didn't rehearse, not once."
"Go ahead."
"What if you're just a rich lonely woman shopping for a daughter?" The words came out flat, no heat, which somehow made them worse. "What if you've spent twenty-five years looking so hard you see your baby in every girl with a birthmark? That's not cruel. That's sad. But I don't want to be someone's project, Eleanor. I've been an orphan for five years and I'm doing fine."
Eleanor went very still. Then she reached into her bag and set something on the table — a small notebook, leather, worn soft at the corners.
"May I?" she said.
Maya nodded.
Eleanor opened it. Page after page of names, dates, notes in tight handwriting. Hundreds of entries.
"Every lead," Eleanor said. "Every tip line, every age-progression artist, every private investigator, every girl who might have been her. Twenty-five years. I have checked every one and I have never — not once — shown up at a stranger's workplace with photographs before I was certain enough to risk it." She closed the notebook. "I am lonely. I won't insult you by denying it. But I am not shopping. I am looking for one specific child, and I stopped counting the false ones a long time ago."
"How many leads?" Maya asked.
"Four hundred and twelve, give or take."
"Jesus."
"Some were kind people. Most were hopeful. A few were cruel." Eleanor searched for the word. "I stopped being angry at the cruel ones somewhere around year ten. They wanted it to be true too, in their way."
Maya looked at the notebook and felt something complicated happen in her chest.
"I'm angry at you," she said quietly.
"I know."
"I don't even know why. You're not the villain here."
"You're allowed to be angry at someone who isn't the villain."
They sat in silence. The tea cooled. The coffee cooled.