Small Acts
Every Anniversary

Ninety-Nine Point Nine Percent

August 25, 2026 · Part 8 of 10 · 2 min

Marlowe's fingers shake tearing the flap. Corinne has gone very still, like she's bracing for something she should have let happen sixteen years ago.

Inside is a single folded printout. A DNA ancestry report from a kit Marlowe apparently sent away for the summer she turned sixteen — some school health project, she mutters, half to herself, barely remembering it now. Corinne had signed for the results, seen the return address, and buried it in a drawer instead of handing it over, too afraid of what a database full of strangers might tell her daughter.

Marlowe unfolds it at the table, and I watch her scan down the page until her eyes stop moving.

"Close family match," she reads aloud, voice cracking on the third word. "Corwin James Ashgrove. Estimated relationship: parent-child. Probability: 99.9 percent."

Nobody says anything for a long moment. Outside, the rain has finally let up.

Somewhere in that report, this apparently isn't the first time a database flagged the match — Corwin himself once submitted a kit years earlier, quietly, searching for a daughter he'd never had the courage to look for directly, and the system had been sitting on a connection neither of us ever logged back in to see.

I reach for the page and my hand won't stop shaking. Reaching across the table, my jacket catches on the chair, and something slides out of the inside pocket and clatters onto the floor.

A pill bottle. Amber plastic, white cap, my name printed on the label along with a drug name I know Marlowe won't recognize but a cardiologist would.

Marlowe picks it up before I can. Reads the label. Looks up at me with an expression that's shifted from shock straight past it into something closer to fear.

"What is this," she says.

I don't answer fast enough.

"Corwin. What is this."

Continue the story Part 9: The Wedding Date →

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