CHAPTER 1

wasn't where she'd thought she'd end up, but they'd been hiring, and she'd needed a new job. At thirty-five, she'd been around the software engineering world for a long time now, and it had always seemed to be a young person's game. As Kieran aged, it was getting more and more difficult for her to find a job as an engineer because employers expected her to want to be a manager by now, but she didn't want to be in management. She loved coding, and that would never change. After leaving her husband, she'd kept her job at a local company for a while, but after their divorce was finalized, she'd started looking for something else.

Kieran had needed a fresh start, and that had included ending a marriage, finding a new place to live, and looking for a new job. The job had taken a while to find, but once she'd managed to get one, she'd been excited for the first time in a while. She was a senior staff engineer now and made forty thousand dollars more than she had at her last job. Her divorce settlement was modest because she hadn't wanted to take Diego for everything he was worth. Their separation had been amicable, so while they weren't exactly friends, they didn't mean any ill will. With that settlement and her new salary, Kieran had been able to get herself a nice two-bedroom place in a small town and use the second bedroom as her office instead of going into the company's office. Grateful she and Diego had never had children, she had no need for the second bedroom to be anything else.

Her first day on the job had been simple enough. She started her new-hire orientation and training and got her systems set up. She had three monitors and the screen on the laptop the company provided. Kieran preferred to have at least two monitors, one vertical and one horizontal, and she'd spent an entire day connecting everything together and making her office exactly what she'd always wanted. In their house, which had been a three-bedroom, Diego had had an at-home office, and they'd used the other bedroom as a guest room. Kieran had worked at the office most of the time because when she wanted to work from home before, she'd been forced to use the kitchen. Finally, after years of wanting more for herself, she'd gone out and had taken what she'd wanted. Being on her own for the first time in her adult life felt good, too. It was lonely, yes, but it was the kind of lonely she thought she needed to feel like herself again.

Diego hadn't been a bad husband. When they'd first started dating in college, he'd been an attentive and loving boyfriend. When he'd gone to law school a state away and she'd gone to graduate school, they'd kept in touch but hadn't been exclusive. Of course, he'd met other women and had had short relationships, while Kieran hadn't found anyone else who was interested in a nerdy coder girl who liked video games and not much else if it didn't involve a screen. Three years after parting for their respective schools, they'd met back up one day for coffee, and they'd been together ever since. He'd been her first and was still her only, but after their first few years of wedded bliss, things had started to change between them. Diego had moved up at his law firm and seemed to want the kind of wife the other lawyers had, which wasn't Kieran. He'd also spent more and more time at the office and less and less with her, to the point where she'd assumed he'd been having an affair. He hadn't been – or, at least, he'd sworn that he hadn't. He just had to work because the more billable hours he got for the firm, the faster he'd make partner.

That had been all he cared about until, one day, he'd asked her about children. That had been around Kieran's thirtieth birthday, and she'd been surprised to hear him bring that up because they'd both said they didn't want kids. There had been a talk, then a fight, which had been followed by another talk and several more fights. He'd expected her to not only have their children but to be their primary caregiver since he had to work so much. When Kieran had asked where this had all come from, he could only mention other associates at work who were starting to have families.

"So, you just want to be able to say you have children, but you don't want to actually have children?" she'd asked one day. "You want me to be here to take care of them all by myself while you just put their pictures on your desk so that you can look good to the partners?"

"That's not it, Kieran," he'd argued.

"We said we didn't want kids," she'd reminded.

"Things change. We're getting older," he'd tried.

The argument had repeated over and over until finally, Kieran had told him that she wouldn't have his kids, and if that was a problem for him, they'd have to figure something else out. He'd said it was fine, and they hadn't talked for the next several days. That had been the beginning of the end, and after she turned thirty-three, she had told him that she wanted a divorce. When they legally separated, he'd moved out of the house and into an apartment closer to his office, and Kieran had started looking for another job. Then, when they'd finalized everything, she'd let him have the house. She hadn't wanted it anyway. It had too many memories of a relationship she wanted to leave in the past.

It hadn't been that easy for Diego, though. He hadn't wanted the divorce. Kieran had known that, but she'd fallen out of love with him and couldn't see a way back. Before the separation, there had been marriage counseling and a book that she'd read on her own, but nothing had worked; the feelings just weren't there anymore. After all those years together, she had made the decision to leave, and she stood by it despite how much she knew it hurt him. Now, Diego could move on, too, and he'd recently made partner at his firm, which meant that they were both on their way to their separate fresh start.

"Hey," she said when he called around nine after her first day at her new job.

"Hey. How was it?" he asked.

"Just the usual training. I also had to take the sexual harassment course, which was an hour long, and then I got my email account set up. That kind of stuff."

"Do you like it so far?"

"It's hard to tell. It's mainly been me doing training. Everything okay?" she asked him.

"Yeah, everything's fine. I just got home and thought I'd call."

"Diego, we–"

"Before you remind me that we're divorced yet again, I only called to tell you that I found some of your stuff in the basement. I was just making small talk before I told you. That's all. I needed some old case files that were down there, and I came across a few boxes that belong to you. It looks like your dad's stuff that your mom gave you when he died."

"His old baseball stuff?" Kieran asked, trying to remember if she'd brought that box with her in the move.

"I only opened one box, but yeah, I'm pretty sure I saw one of those baseball card book things in there."

"I thought I brought all that with me."

"Well, it's still here. I can bring it over this weekend, if you want. It's fine here, if you want to leave it, but I can bring it over."

"I can pick it up."

"You won't be able to fit everything in that tiny car you drive. His old bat bag is here, and there are at least four boxes."

Kieran's father had been a college baseball coach and had played in the minor leagues for a few years, on his way to the majors, before a shoulder injury had sidelined him, and he'd moved into coaching. A lifelong fan of the sport, he'd collected baseball cards since he'd been a kid, and when he'd passed away from cancer six years ago, her mother had given Kieran all of his old baseball stuff.

"I have the SUV. Just let me bring it over for you," Diego added. "It's not that long of a drive anyway, and we could catch up."

"About what, Diego? We just talked last week."

"Your new job. I can tell you about the partnership. I'll bring lunch or something. Tacos. You love those pork tacos."

"I'll let you know. I have training this whole week, and it's exhausting. I have to get through that first before they actually let me do my job. Let me text you later this week, okay? I'm still getting this place set up and will probably be running errands anyway."

"So, you'll be too exhausted to have lunch with me but not too exhausted to run errands?"

"Diego, I need to go now. I haven't had dinner yet, so I need to eat something before I call it a night," Kieran lied.

"All right. Fine. Just let me know about the weekend. I need to know before I make plans myself, obviously."

"I will. Thanks for letting me know and for the offer."

"Good night, Kieran."

"Night, Diego," she replied and hung up.

Calls like this one still came at least once a week, but when she'd first left, there had been daily texts, too. Sometimes, Diego would remind her about something she'd remember on her own. Other times, he'd ask if she wanted to talk over coffee or a meal. She figured she should at least be happy that instead of every day, it was only once a week now because that probably meant that soon, they'd be once a month, which, she felt, would be more appropriate for exes trying to find their way toward friendship.

Kieran went into her kitchen and decided she'd make herself some popcorn as a snack since she'd eaten dinner around six but was still hungry. She added the extra melted butter that she preferred, along with probably way too much salt, and sat down in front of the TV in the living room. She wouldn't mess up her controllers with butter hands, so she just turned the TV on, deciding to find a movie to watch while she was finishing her snack. Then, she'd either play something or work on the app she'd been building on the side for the past few months.

The idea had been her friend's, who wasn't technical, so Kieran had offered to, at minimum, create her a viable product that would get her friend started, and Ruthie, in turn, had agreed to give her a percentage of the business should it take off. Building an app from scratch wasn't hard for Kieran, but Ruthie kept evolving her idea. One day, it had two features. The next, she wanted a third added. Then, there also needed to be a way for people to pay through app stores, despite Ruthie initially telling her that she hadn't planned on launching with in-app purchases. Every day, it seemed, there was a new text from the woman with a different request. While Kieran enjoyed building things and didn't mind adding new features, she also wished she had the full scope of the project from the start so that she wouldn't have to scrap parts of the code or make copious changes to it. It gave her something to do in her evenings that wasn't work-related, though, and since she now lived over an hour away from her friends and family, she could use fun things to do from afar that still kept her connected to all of them.

She found herself in bed later that night, working on the app, when an email came into her personal account. It was from DNAdiscovery.com, too, which was weird that it landed in her personal inbox and not her work one. Then, she remembered that this was part of her benefits package. DNAdiscovery was a company that, by swabbing people's cheeks, collected their DNA so that it could get analyzed before a database of now hundreds of thousands of samples could spit back out their relatives and ancestry. While the company already offered more than some of its competitors at the moment, part of what Kieran had been hired for was to expand their feature offerings by building the things the new product managers said they'd need, and for being an employee, she could have a test kit sent to her home and get the results back, all completely free of charge.

It was actually something that had intrigued her about working there. Of course, nothing had stopped her from using their service in the past, or one of the others that offered it, for that matter, but she'd never given it much serious thought until after her dad died. When he'd gotten sick, he and her mother had finally sat her down and had revealed to Kieran that she was adopted.

It had been the biggest shock of her life because she'd always thought she looked like the perfect combination of her parents. She had her father's sandy brown hair and her mother's green eyes. They hadn't told her earlier because it hadn't ever been needed. She'd been lucky not to have any major accidents or injuries that would've required a blood match, and she hadn't had any serious illnesses that could've required an organ donation or, at minimum, an awkward and difficult conversation. That day, though, they'd sat her down and told her the truth. She'd been abandoned. No one knew who her biological parents were. There was no record of her birth, so there had been no birth parents to find.

She'd taken a while to deal with that and had spent a few months in therapy, but when her dad had gotten worse, she'd stopped going to help her mom and had focused on him. Then, after he'd died, Kieran had certainly wondered if she'd find anything out using one of these sites, but she hadn't wanted to hurt her mom, who was still dealing with her husband's death. It had felt like trying to find someone who hadn't raised her might cause the woman more pain, and Kieran hadn't been interested in that at all.

As she stared at the email, which required her to click a button and enter her address to have the test kit shipped to her, she wondered what might be revealed if she swabbed her cheek. Maybe she'd find out who her birth parents were. Maybe she had siblings, aunts, uncles, or cousins out there. Deciding she'd do it and not tell her mother about it just yet since it might not turn into anything, and she still worried about hurting her, Kieran clicked the button and entered her information. The kit would arrive in two days. The testing itself had the option to be expedited for employees upon request, which she requested, and it would only take a few weeks.

She closed her computer and thought about it. She might have more family out there, people who might not even know that she existed all this time and that she had no idea existed, either. Kieran wondered what they'd look like, what they'd be like, what they all did for a living, and if they lived close. She could picture herself meeting someone for coffee and laughing over old family stories. Of course, she'd have to message those people first, telling them that she was their relation, but she could already envision learning more about them and asking them about her birth parents. Not being able to do any of that just yet, though, she wrapped up for the night and tried to get some sleep.