"You did what?"
Eric looked at her. He did not mean to; it was reflex, the way you look toward a sound. There was something in her expression he did not recognize, a stillness that seemed out of proportion with an ancestry kit, which, as far as he knew, was the sort of thing people got their parents for Christmas so they could find out they were twelve percent Norwegian.
"Why are you upset?"
She did not answer him. She was looking at Tyler. Behind her, Jenna had set her own cup down on the patio table very carefully, the way someone sets down a thing they are afraid of dropping.
"The site says there's a problem."
Tyler's thumb moved over his phone screen without his seeming to notice it, scrolling up and down, up and down, as though the words on it might shift into something else if he touched them enough times.
"Those tests aren't always accurate."
Melissa said it quickly, almost before he had finished speaking, in the bright practical tone she used when Lily scraped a knee and needed to be told it was nothing. But it came out a beat too fast, and a little too high, and Eric heard it. He was certain afterward that he had heard it, that some part of him had registered the wrongness of it right then, with the burgers spitting on the grill and the children shrieking in the pool, before anything had been said at all.