A Glitch

Nadia picked up on the first ring, with a child wailing behind her and a pan boiling over, and she shouted “Lucía!” as if it had been ten years and not just since Christmas.

“Hang on, hang on, I'm turning the gas off. Ilyas, let go of your sister. Let go of her. There. What's happened? Is your mum all right?”

“She's fine. I wanted to ask you something stupid.”

It was half past eight on Monday evening. Lucía had waited all day to ring, telling herself it was ridiculous, that it could wait, that Nadia would laugh. She was in the car, parked outside the hospital, twenty minutes before her shift, engine off, the heater going cold.

“Your DNA test. The one in 2024. That was Filiora, wasn't it?”

“Oh! You've done it too? I knew you'd get round to it. Brilliant, isn't it? How much Moroccan are you?”

“Two per cent.”

“I'm six! Dad's furious. He says we've got a Moor in the family and it's his grandmother's fault.”

“Nadia. Have you still got your account? Can people see your matches?”

“Course. I've even got a cousin in Málaga, Maribel, a Ruiz García, we write to each other. Her grandad and mine were brothers. She sent me photos of the village, the church, our great-grandad's grave, everything. We've got two hundred and forty whatsits in common. Centimorgans. Why?”

Lucía looked out through the windscreen. An ambulance was pulling into the yard, no siren, lights off.

“I can't see you,” she said.

“What do you mean, you can't see me?”

“On my list. You're not there. Not you, not Maribel.”

Nadia said nothing for a second. With Nadia, a second's silence was an event.

“It's a glitch,” she said. “It happens. There's glitches everywhere. My bank had a glitch, they took the rent out twice. Write to them.”

---

Lucía wrote to them on her two a.m. break, from the computer in the on-call room, in between checking CTG traces. She wrote in French, politely, precisely, the way she wrote her handover notes: her name, her kit number, her cousin's name, roughly when her cousin had taken the test, and that her cousin could see other matches while Lucía couldn't see her cousin.

The reply came at eleven on Tuesday morning, while she was asleep. She read it at three in the afternoon, in bed, curtains drawn.

“Dear Mrs Morales, thank you for your message. We have checked your profile and that of the person you mention. Both analyses are valid and were processed normally. Both profiles have matching enabled. We can find no technical fault. Please bear in mind that first cousins always share DNA: 870 cM on average, never less than about 400. When two people do not match, there can be several explanations, including a family relationship other than the one you assume. To find out more, see our 'Unexpected Discoveries' page. Kind regards, Filiora Customer Service.”

Unexpected Discoveries. She didn't click. She knew what would be on the page. Photos of people hugging on station platforms. A helpline number.

Never less than four hundred. She had nothing. Not four hundred. Not a hundred. Not ten. Zero.

---

Thomas came home at half past five with a bag of marking and a baguette. She was in the kitchen, sitting down, phone face down on the table. He could tell from her hand, which was at her ear.

“What is it?”

She showed him the message. He read it standing up, in his coat, the baguette under his arm. He read it again. Thomas always read things twice, it came with the job: the first time to understand, the second to find out what the author was trying to hide.

He sat down opposite her without taking off his coat.

“Right,” he said. “Right. So there are two possibilities.”

“Go on.”

“Maybe Nadia isn't…”

He didn't finish. He was too polite to drag Uncle Juan through the mud in his own kitchen. But she could see where it went: maybe the aunt, Juan's wife, one day in 1987, with a neighbour, a colleague, a stranger. It happened. It happened more often than people thought. She had seen it in the delivery room once or twice, a father who looked at the baby too long and said nothing.

“Nadia's got Juan's face,” said Lucía. “His nose, his chin, his voice. She's even got his hands. And Maribel's related to Nadia. Maribel's a García from Málaga. If I were a García, I'd share something with Maribel too.”

“So…”

“Or maybe it's me.”

Thomas didn't answer. At last he took off his coat, folded it over the back of the chair, and went to put the kettle on for a cup of tea neither of them wanted.

---

She didn't sleep that night, though she wasn't on shift. She lay beside Thomas, who slept on his back with his hands folded on his chest like an effigy on a tomb, and she let whatever came come.

What came was Triana.

The summers. Every summer of her childhood, until she was ten. Her father's Ford Sierra loaded to the roof, the tarpaulin on top held down with bungee cords, Belgian chocolates for the family in a cool box that kept nothing cool. Two days on the road. The night in a roadside hotel near Burgos, where her father slept in his clothes. The Despeñaperros pass, the red rocks, her mother crossing herself on the bends. And the heat coming in through the wound-down windows, a heat she only ever knew there, that smelled of tar and fennel.

Aunt Pepa's flat. Third floor, in a narrow street near a church, with a tiled patio where the washing hung and canary cages on the balconies. Pepa was Charo's older sister, fat, always laughing, widowed, with a moustache she made no effort to hide. She called Lucía la belguita. She slipped her money for ice creams behind Charo's back, and Charo knew, and pretended she didn't.

And the woman next door.

Lucía couldn't remember her name any more. She remembered the woman. Young and thin, a woman who didn't laugh. Who lived, or visited, across the landing, at an old lady's flat. Who made pestiños, those honey and aniseed fritters, in a big black pan, and always put some aside for Lucía in greaseproof paper. Who did her hair. Lucía remembered that exactly: the woman's hands in her hair, working the knots out without pulling, with a patience Charo didn't have. And a sadness around her, like a smell. She had never known why the lady across the landing was sad. She only remembered that nobody asked her questions either.

And there was the little girl. The daughter, or the granddaughter, from the flat across the way. Dark, small, skinny, knees always grazed, who played with her on the landing, in the patio, in the street, jacks, hopscotch, telling each other things she'd since forgotten. She remembered a voice that was hoarse for a child. A laugh. She didn't remember the name.

And then one summer, nothing.

She was ten. Or eleven, the summer they didn't go. She had asked. She remembered asking at the table, and Charo's answer, as she cut up an escalope, without looking up:

“We're not going any more. Pepa's dead.”

And that was that. They never went again. No Ford, no tarpaulin, no pestiños. Charo hadn't been back to Seville since. Not once. Lucía had thought that was normal, at ten. At twenty she had thought it was sad. At thirty she didn't think about it. She had been to Seville just once, with Thomas, in 2008, three days of sightseeing, the cathedral, the Alcázar, and she hadn't looked for Pepa's street. She didn't even know why she hadn't.

Beside her, Thomas turned over and mumbled something in Dutch.

Lucía took her phone from the bedside table, turned the brightness right down and opened Filiora again.

There was still the other side. If she wasn't a García, maybe Charo had… She pushed the sentence away. She didn't need the sentence. She needed a name.

Antonio Morales. Her father's brother's son. Fifty-two, a welder in Seraing, a moustache like a gendarme's, a wife from Liège who made the best waffles in the world. He'd done the test in 2025, after Manuel died, because he said the old ones took the stories with them and he wanted to know what was left. He'd told everyone about it the summer before, at Charo's eightieth, in the back room of a restaurant near Brussels-Midi station. He'd said “Filiora”, Lucía was almost sure. He'd said he had found Moraleses in Argentina, descendants of an uncle who left in 1920.

Her father's brother's son. A first cousin. Never less than four hundred.

She typed “Morales”.

There were three. A Rosa Morales, Mexico City, distant cousin, 22 cM. A José Luis Morales, Zaragoza, 18 cM. A Morales with no first name, in Peru, 9 cM. Moraleses like hundreds of thousands of others across the Spanish-speaking world, chance Moraleses, the sort you share with a stranger thanks to nothing more than some common ancestor who died in the seventeenth century.

She typed “Antonio”. She typed “Liège”, “Seraing”, “Belgium”. She scrolled through the whole list a second time, as slowly as a woman counting stitches.

Antonio wasn't there either.

Beside her, without opening his eyes, Thomas asked what she was looking for.

“My father,” she said.