Part one

Nicolas gave it to me for Christmas. A small white and blue box, slipped under the tree between a scarf and a cookbook.

“A DNA test,” he said, very pleased with himself. “To find out if you’ve got Viking ancestors. You spit in the tube, you post it, and in six weeks you know everything.”

Everyone laughed. We were at my parents’ house in Chênée, the little house on the rue des Haisses where I grew up. Dad said the only Viking thing about our family was my brother’s appetite. Mum smiled too. Then she got up to fetch the Yule log, and I remember she took a very long time to come back from the kitchen.

I didn’t pay any attention. Why would I have?

My father’s name is Jean-Marc. He is sixty-six. He was the postman in Chênée for thirty-five years, and everyone in the neighbourhood still knows him. He was the one who taught me to ride a bike, in the Delhaize car park, one Sunday morning, running behind me with one hand on the saddle. He was the one who picked me up from school when it rained, with his big Post Office umbrella. He was the one who cried at my wedding, before he even got to the church.

I am thirty-four. I look like him, everyone says so. The same grey eyes, the same way of wrinkling my nose when I laugh.

I spat in the tube the day after Christmas. I posted it. Then I forgot about it.

The results arrived one Tuesday in February, by email. “Your DNA results are ready!” I opened the app on the bus, on my way home from work.

First there were the origins. Belgium, northern France, a bit of Germany, a tiny bit of Ireland. No Vikings. I took a screenshot for Nicolas.

Then there was a tab I hadn’t noticed: “DNA Matches”. People who had taken the same test and shared DNA with me.

The first name made me smile. One of Mum’s cousins, Brigitte, who lives in Verviers and spends her retirement doing genealogy. “First cousin of your mother — likely.” That was right.

I looked for Dad’s family. I knew his cousin Paulette had taken the test; she had talked about it all through a First Communion lunch. Paulette wasn’t there. Not her, not anyone on Dad’s side. As if half my family didn’t exist.

And right at the top of the list, above Mum’s cousin, was a man I didn’t know.

“Bastien D., 31, Tournai. Estimated relationship: half-brother.”

I read the line three times. Then I closed the app and opened it again, the way you switch a computer off and on when it crashes.

It wasn’t a glitch.

I waited until I was alone with Mum. The following Saturday, Dad had gone to the pétanque club, as he did every Saturday. Mum was making coffee in the kitchen. I showed her my phone without a word.

She looked at the screen. She put the coffee pot down. Very gently, as if she was afraid of breaking it.

“Don’t say anything to your father,” she said.

“Mum…”

“He doesn’t know. He must never know. Do you hear me? Never.”

Her hands were shaking. I had never seen her like that. My mother is a strong woman, who worked forty years on a supermarket till, who doesn’t cry at funerals and who fixes her own taps.

“It was a mistake,” she said. “Just once. Thirty-five years ago. I’m not going to talk about it, Camille. Don’t ask me. Your father is your father. Nothing else matters.”

She poured the coffee. She brought out some biscuits. She talked about the neighbour, the price of heating oil, pétanque. As if nothing had happened. And I drank my coffee without tasting it, looking at my parents’ wedding photo on the fridge, Dad in a suit that was too big for him, Mum with a crown of flowers in her hair.

A mistake. Just once.

I didn’t believe her. I don’t know why. But I didn’t believe her.

That same evening, I wrote to Bastien through the app’s messaging service. A very short message that I rewrote ten times.

“Hello. The app says we are half-brother and half-sister. I don’t understand. Do you?”

He replied the next morning.

“I do. I have for a long time. But not by message. Can you come to Tournai?”

We met on a Sunday, in a café on the Grand-Place in Tournai, opposite the belfry. He was already there when I arrived. A tall dark young man in a green jumper, with a cardboard folder on the table.

He stood up. He looked at me. And he smiled, with a funny grimace, wrinkling his nose.

I shivered. He wrinkled his nose exactly like me.

“I was conceived by insemination,” he said once we sat down. “My parents always told me. An anonymous donor, at the CHR de la Citadelle in Liège, in 1994. My parents couldn’t have children. I never tried to find out who it was. And then, at thirty, I wanted to know. I took the test. And I found a cousin of the donor, who put me on the trail. A very kind old gentleman, who gave me a photo.”

He opened the folder.

“If you’re my half-sister, then you’re his daughter too. I wanted you to see him before I tell you his name.”

He laid the photo on the table, between our two cups.

An old photo, slightly yellowed. A man of thirty in a leather jacket, sitting on a motorbike, in front of a house I knew by heart.

I recognised the house before I recognised the man. Then I recognised the man.