They were not all strangers.
The first match on the list, labeled Close Family, was someone named Sofia Reyes. Predicted relationship: half-sibling. Shared DNA: 24.6%. Her profile picture was a girl of maybe thirteen or fourteen holding up a soccer trophy, squinting into the sun. She had dark hair, and dark eyes, and a gap between her front teeth.
The second match was a woman named Karen Lindqvist Moore, predicted relationship: first cousin once removed. Tyler knew that name. Karen was his mother's cousin in Minneapolis who sent a Christmas card every year with a photo of her three enormous golden retrievers. So the test was his. The lab had not mixed anything up. His mother's side was right there on the screen, exactly where it should be.
It was then, sitting on the edge of his bed with his heart beginning to pound, that he had remembered Uncle Mark.
Last Christmas Aunt Dana had given Mark one of these same kits, from this same company, as a joke gift, and Mark had spent all of January telling anyone who would listen that he was three point one percent Neanderthal, which explained, he said, why he liked meat and hated small talk. Mark had posted his results on Facebook. Mark was on this site.
Tyler had typed his uncle's name into the search bar of the DNA Relatives page. The profile came up instantly: Mark Dawson, Mesa, Arizona, a photo of him in a Cardinals cap holding a fish. Tyler had tapped it. The page had loaded, and in the place where it should have said Uncle, or Close Family, or anything at all, it said, in calm gray letters:
You and Mark Dawson do not share any detectable DNA.
He had logged out. He had logged back in. He had refreshed the page and searched again. He had gone to the company's help pages and read the section about how relatives are calculated, how an uncle should share roughly a quarter of your DNA, how the algorithm was considered extremely reliable for close relationships. He had sat there with the phone growing warm in his hand.