Around them the yard had gone strangely quiet, the way a room goes quiet when a glass breaks. Only the children in the pool were still shouting, oblivious, and the speaker kept playing its song about a dirt road and a girl in a pickup truck. Eric looked at the grill, at the burgers going black at the edges, as if he could not quite work out what they were for.
"Mark," he said. "Can you…"
Mark was already beside him, taking the spatula. "Got it. Go."
Eric followed his wife and son through the sliding door into the kitchen. The air conditioning hit him like cold water. The kitchen smelled of onions and the lemon dish soap Melissa liked. On the counter were the trays of buns and sliced tomatoes and cheese he had arranged an hour ago, when the evening had been an ordinary evening. Melissa slid the door shut behind them and then, after a moment, pulled the blinds down over it, and that small act, the clatter of the slats, frightened Eric more than anything that had happened so far.
"Okay," he said. "Somebody tell me what's going on."
Tyler held out the phone. Eric took it.
He was not good with these apps. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at: the pie chart with its wedges, the amber slice, the percentages. He frowned at it. He did not understand, for a second, why it mattered. People found out surprising things on these tests all the time. Then Tyler reached over without a word and tapped the screen, and the relatives list came up, and the face of a girl with a soccer trophy, and the words half-sibling. Then Tyler tapped again, and there was Mark's face, Mark in his stupid Cardinals hat holding a stupid fish, and the gray line of text beneath it.
You and Mark Dawson do not share any detectable DNA.