There are several other doors nearby. After a moment I start to walk toward one of them. I dread finding out what's behind it, but I need to discover what these doors are all about, and I can't do that without more information.

Breath held, I pull the door open.

"Sixteen years!" My father is screaming. "Sixteen years I've been paying to support a child who isn't even mine! Paycheck after paycheck, bleeding me dry . . . Don't try to tell me she's mine! I SAW THE PICTURES!"

I'm about to shut this door as well, when suddenly a flicker of movement from the far side of the room catches my eye. It's coming from the very place where I had once hidden myself, listening in horror as my own father disowned me. But this time I'm not the one who's eavesdropping.

It's Tommy.

"I'll tell you what," Mom is saying. A shadow of strength has come into her voice "We'll go and get tested. All right? You and me and Jessica, all together. And then the doctor can show you that the DNA matches up and she's really your daughter, and then you can go home and work on some new conspiracy to get all upset about, but I WILL NEVER SEE YOU IN MY HOUSE AGAIN!"

I slam the door shut.

Is this what's behind every one of them? A rerun of that terrible night? No, Tommy's presence implies there's something more to this. Despite my horror, I can't deny the sharp bite of curiosity. It's like when you drive by a gruesome car accident. You don't want to look at it, but you have to.

Trembling inside, I begin to open other doors. Each one seems to have the same scene going on behind it, but in a slightly different version. At first the changes are small: maybe the room is decorated differently, or my parents use different words to say the same things-inconsequential stuff. But the further I get from my starting point, the bigger the changes become. Until at last I open one of them and the room behind it is deathly still. There's blood splattered all over the place and a sickening smell in the air. My mother's body is lying motionless on the floor. One side of her head has been crushed. A broken lamp lies next to her. My father is nowhere to be seen.

I turn and run.

It's only a dream, I tell myself, tears streaming down my cheeks. Only a dream. I can wake up if I want to. But when I try and it doesn't work, I know I'm trapped in this terrible place.

Suddenly I am standing in front of another door. I reach out and open it, not because I want to, but because the dream has taken on a momentum all its own, and I am helpless to do anything else.

"I'm sorry," this version of my father is saying. Tears are running down his face. "I'm so sorry, Evelyn! I've been such a jerk to you and the kids. Can you ever forgive me? I mean, I know we can't just turn back the clock, but if you'll give me a chance to make things right-any chance at all-I'll see that you never regret it."

It's all too much. Too much! Sinking down beside the doorframe, I start to cry. "Please," I whisper. Praying to whoever controls this terrible place. "Let me go home now. Please."

And the blackness surrounding me gives way to a gentler darkness, and then, mercifully, to dreamless sleep.

The waiting room at the lab was decorated in a disturbing mix of techno and Victoriana: artistic schizophrenia. The walls and ceiling were stark white, the floor was polished to an antiseptic sheen, and the chrome-and-gla.s.s furniture in the receptionist's s.p.a.ce was aggressively ergonomic. G.o.d help the germ that wandered into this place. But someone had apparently questioned how comfortable the setting would be for actual patients, and so had stolen a dozen heavily upholstered chairs from the set of Masterpiece Theater and set them up in a corner of the waiting room. To my eye, the ornate wooden chairs seemed to be screaming in aesthetic agony: Get me out of here! Never before had I had such an overwhelming urge to ship furniture back to England.

Mom and I sat in overstuffed chairs and riffled through an uninspiring pile of magazines. Better Housekeeping, Sports Ill.u.s.trated, Highlights. If you picked one not intended for your age and gender, would they note that on your intake form? I picked up a Highlights and briefly relived my childhood as I flipped through the pages, my hands trembling ever so slightly.

"Hey." Mom reached out and put her hand over mine. "It's all going to be all right. Really."

"I know," I muttered.

"This is to calm your dad down," she reminded me. "There's no real question about the outcome."

I sighed and put the magazine down. "I know."

There were all sorts of questions I wanted to ask Mom, inspired by stuff I'd seen in my dream, but since I normally didn't tell her about my dreams at all-not the weird ones, anyway-I didn't know how to start. Finally I ventured, "About Dad. Was he really . . . well, you know . . . crazy?"

Mom sighed and looked down at her lap. "Your father had some problems," she said quietly. Picking her way through the words as if tiptoeing through a mine field. "He didn't know how to deal with his feelings, so sometimes he didn't handle it well."

My throat tightened. I remembered all the versions of my father that I'd seen last night. The smashed lamps. My mother's crushed skull.

It was just a dream, I told myself stubbornly. Pull yourself together, girl.

"Hey." Mom leaned over and put an arm around my shoulders, squeezing me gently. "It'll be okay. Really."

The words came out before I could stop them. "Why did he leave us?"

Mom sighed heavily. "Your dad was full of fear, Jesse. He was afraid that if he didn't control everyone and everything around him, he would lose it all. The trouble is that sometimes, when you hold onto a thing you love too tightly, you can crush the life out of it." She paused. "Or drive it away."

"Do you still love him?"

A shadow of pain crossed her face; she touched her lips gently to my forehead. "You can't raise two children with someone and not love him," she whispered. "That doesn't mean it's right for us to be together."

Someone coughed gently. We looked up to find an orderly standing at a respectful distance. She was wearing dress scrubs with a sprinkling of tiny planets and stars all over them, reminding me of Tommy's Star Wars pajamas.

"The doctor will see you now," she said.

She let us through a pair of gla.s.s doors at the end of the waiting room, down a squeaky-clean hallway flanked by claustrophobically small exam rooms, and into a consulting office. It was a spartan s.p.a.ce, with only a desk and a few chairs in it. As we were in the process of sitting down, an Indian-looking man in a lab coat arrived.

"Ms. Drake. I'm Dr. Gupta. I'll be discussing your test results with you." He turned to me and offered a well-rehea.r.s.ed smile. "And you must be Jessica."

We all shook hands. I tried to make my grip feel strong and confident, even though I felt anything but.

"Will Mr. Hayden be coming?" the doctor asked. "We do prefer to speak to the whole family together in situations like this." Maybe it was just that my nerves were on edge, but I thought he stressed the last three words slightly.

"He's away on business right now." Mom had actually gone out of her way to schedule this meeting at a time when Dad couldn't come, but the doctor had no way to know that. "I'm sure he'll get in touch with you when he comes home."

"Very well." Dr. Gupta sat behind the desk and cleared his throat as he opened a manila folder with my name on it. A shadow crossed his face as he read. He closed the folder, rested his elbows on the table, and steepled his hands in front of him. "Ms. Drake . . . Jessica. . . ."

My heart skipped a beat. Call me paranoid, but I've never seen a doctor do that when the news was good.

"I'm afraid the results of the paternity test were negative."

For a moment the words just hung there in the air between us. Like a ball had been thrown to us, that no one wanted to catch.

At last my mother spoke. "Are you saying that Mike isn't Jessica's father?"

The doctor nodded. "I'm afraid that's the case."

"But that's not possible."

"The test results are quite clear. I'm sorry, Ms. Drake."

"No. No." She shook her head emphatically. "You don't understand what I'm saying. It's not physically possible."

"I'm afraid the data-"

"Unless you're suggesting some kind of immaculate conception -"

He raised up a hand to still her protest. "Please, Ms. Drake. Please." He waited until she calmed herself and then said, very gently, "The issue isn't only with your husband's DNA."

Mom blinked. "What? What do you mean?"

"Jessica's genetic profile isn't a match to yours, either."

Say what?

Had he really just told us that I wasn't my mother's daughter? The thought was so crazy my brain could hardly process it. Maybe I'd misunderstood him.

Mom reached out for my hand and squeezed it so hard that I thought her nails would break skin. "That's not possible," she said firmly. "Jesse is my daughter."

So then he explained to us about how DNA testing worked, and why the results meant what they meant. I only half-listened. I mean, we've all watched Law and Order, right? So everybody knows about spectrum a.n.a.lysis, and the bands of marking that look like bar codes, which tell you what your genes are like, and how, if you put a child's bar codes next to her father's-or her mother's-some of them are supposed to match up.

Then he showed us the sheets of plastic our bar codes were on, mine and Mom's and Dad's, and no, they didn't match up at all.

Zero percent, he said. Those were the odds that Evelyn Rose Drake was my mother. Ditto for Michael Glenn Hayden being my dad. Not even one percent. Zero.

To say that I was confused would be an understatement. I felt as if someone had struck me square in the gut. My hand could no longer feel Mom's nails biting into it. My mind could no longer process a rational thought. I felt disconnected, like a boat whose anchor had suddenly been cut loose, and there I was in the middle of a stormy sea with nothing to keep me from being swept away and lost forever. I felt like throwing up.

"It just isn't possible," my mother protested. But with less conviction this time. She watched Law and Order, too.

He explained to us about mitochondrial DNA, and how that's pa.s.sed down straight from mother to daughter, and so they had checked that too, just to be sure. He showed us the printouts. Still no match.

I hated him for the pity that was in his eyes, because it was so obviously rehea.r.s.ed. How did it feel to deliver news like this to someone? To know that with a handful of words you could tear the soul of a family to pieces? I felt hot tears coming to my eyes, but I struggled to blink them back. I didn't want this man to see how badly he had upset me. No stranger should have that kind of power over me.

This can't be happening, I told myself. It's all a bad dream. I'll wake up any minute now.

"Hospitals do make mistakes sometimes," the doctor was saying. "It's unfortunate, but even in this country, with all its safeguards, babies do get mixed up."

"Labs make mistakes too," my mother challenged him. "Maybe your test was wrong. Maybe your samples got switched around. Isn't that a more likely scenario than someone handing me the wrong baby?"

"Our lab protocols are meticulous," he said coldly. "And we have safeguards in place to avoid just that kind of mistake."

But Mom wouldn't accept his rea.s.surance. And In the end he agreed to do the test a second time. He even agreed that the lab would pay for it. Which was a good thing, because insurance didn't cover this kind of thing.

So I sat there numbly while they stuck a swab in my mouth-again-wondering what my life would become if this was really true. It was too scary to think about.

Mom and I were silent for most of the trip home. I pressed my face against the car window and watched the scenery of Route 28 pa.s.s us by without really seeing it. If I wasn't really the daughter of Evelyn and Michael Hayden, who was I?

As we crossed the I-66 junction I muttered, "Am I adopted?"

Mom glanced at me. She said nothing. A few hundred feet later there was a wide enough shoulder for her to pull off onto, and she did so, putting the car in park. Then she turned to me and took my face in both her hands.

"You are my daughter," she told me sternly. "I gave birth to you in Mana.s.sas Hospital, with your father present. They took you out of my body and cleaned you up and wrapped you in a towel and put you in my arms, and then your dad came and touched your hand, and your little fingers curled around his fingertip-"

I could see tears br.i.m.m.i.n.g in her eyes, which made tears come to mine.

"I have a birth certificate with your name on it. You can look at it if you want to. Jessica Anne Drake-Hayden. My daughter."

"Are we going to tell Dad about this?" I whispered.

I could see a flicker of fear in her eyes. It had been ten years since he'd left us, and she was still afraid of him.

She turned back to the road, turned her left signal on, and put the car in drive.

"When we have to," she said.

Mom didn't tell Tommy about the tests results, just that there had been a problem with the original procedure, and it had to be repeated. He was a smart kid, though, and he could probably tell from our expressions that something was seriously wrong. But Mom had decided to spare him the truth-at least until the test results were confirmed-and I went along with that. Later, when Tommy would normally have grilled me for more information privately, he surprised me by not asking questions. Maybe he sensed that if I tried to talk about what had happened at the lab I would break down in tears, or put my fist through a wall while I screamed curses at the heavens, or . . . something. Like I said, he was a smart kid.

Sample contamination. That's what Mom told him. The original samples had gotten contaminated, so we'd been asked to provide new ones. Now we had to wait for new results. Ten days.

Dad would be back by then.

Midnight. I couldn't sleep.

No, that wasn't accurate. I wasn't willing to sleep. Because this was the kind of night when I usually had weird dreams, and right now I just wasn't up to dealing with them.

I read in bed for awhile, my body positioned between the lamp and the door so that Mom wouldn't realize I was still awake. Then, come midnight, when I figured everyone else had fallen asleep, I turned off the lamp, left my room, and sneaked quietly downstairs.

The "office" was actually a walk-in pantry, which Mom had outfitted with a computer desk and a few filing cabinets. The files themselves were pretty well organized, so it didn't take me long to find my birth certificate, along with all the other paperwork that had accompanied my entry into this world. I even found a form with a pair of tiny footprints on it, and for a moment I was tempted to ink up my fully grown feet and see if they matched. But what would that tell me? If two babies had been switched at the hospital, it could have happened before those prints were made.

I put everything back where I'd found it and started back to my room.

On the way I pa.s.sed Tommy's door. And I stopped. After a moment, I opened it quietly and slipped inside. The room was dark, but the slatted blinds hadn't been shut completely, so thin bands of moonlight fell across the bed, illuminating a mound of blankets, toys, and Tommy.

As I stared down at him I felt a mixture of love and confusion so strong that I didn't know how to handle it.

You're not really my brother.

I formed the words in my mind, testing them, but they had no real substance. No reality.

For thirteen years this crazy kid had been part of my life. I'd hated him and loved him and resented him and needed him-sometimes all of those things at once. I'd tormented him when he was learning to walk and comforted him when he fell off his bike, and climbed into Mom's bed with him the night that Dad left us, so that the three of us could cry quietly in the darkness together. Which bonded us together in ways no words could ever capture. Since then I had been like a second mother to him, filling in for Mom while she struggled to make ends meet.

Now, after all that, five simple words threatened to come between us: You're not really my brother.

What did those words mean, really? That a couple of genes weren't arranged the way they should be? So what? That didn't change who I was, did it? Or dictate who I was allowed to love?

Maybe the lab really had screwed up the test, I thought. Maybe they would call us in a few days to tell us that, and then everything would go back to normal. But as much as I hoped that would happen, deep in my gut I didn't really believe it. Ever since childhood I'd felt as if something in my life was out of kilter. There was nothing concrete that I could ever point to and complain about, just an indefinable sense of wrongness that had always haunted me. Now, at last, that feeling had a name. Things with names didn't just go away.

I recalled a Law and Order episode I saw once, in which a nine-year-old boy learned that he'd been kidnapped from his birth-parents back when he was just an infant. Years later they found him and applied for legal custody. The judge ruled in their favor, and so they took that happy kid away from the family who had raised him, the only family he'd ever known. DNA trumps love. I still remembered the look on his face when that ruling was announced. Like his whole world had been destroyed.

At sixteen, I was past the age when such a thing was likely to happen to me. At worst, a couple of strangers calling themselves my "real mother and father" might visit, and we'd all try to be polite to one another as we joked bitterly about the lousy security in the hospital where Mom had given birth. And then they would go back to their house, and I would stay in mine, and we'd all try to put the pieces of our lives back together again, as if nothing had ever happened.

Yes, I thought stubbornly. That's how it will be.

Looking down at my brother, I felt a sudden wave of tenderness and fear come over me, so powerful it brought tears to my eyes. I will always be your sister, I promised him silently. No one will ever be allowed to come between us. I swear it.