Natalya took another sheet from the folder and handed it to Dasha.
“See for yourself.”
It was an official lab report. Numbers, percentages, terms Dasha didn’t understand. But at the bottom, in the conclusion section, it was written clearly and distinctly: “Probability of kinship between sample A (Natalya Dorokhova) and sample B (unknown) – 99.7%. Degree of kinship: Aunt-Niece.”
Dasha’s hands trembled. She was holding proof. Scientific, irrefutable proof that this woman was her biological aunt. Her mother’s sister.
“It’s true,” she whispered. “You’re… you’re really her sister?”
“Yes, Dasha. I am really her sister. I am really your aunt. And now you are the only family I have.”
Dasha sat on the sofa, clutching the genetic test result in her hands. The letters blurred before her eyes from tears, from exhaustion, from everything at once. 99.7%. Almost absolute certainty. Natalya was her aunt. Her mother’s sister. This was no longer a story, not words, not someone’s memories. It was a fact, confirmed by science.
“You said you wanted to tell me something about my father,” she said, without looking up. “In the message, you wrote: ‘It concerns your mother and your father.’ What did you mean?”
Natalya was silent for a long time. Dasha could hear cars passing outside, a door slamming somewhere in the building, the clock ticking on the wall. The ordinary sounds of an ordinary world that continued to exist, even as her own world was crumbling to pieces.
“After I learned of Olya’s death,” Natalya finally began, “I couldn’t pull myself together for a long time. For several months, I just existed. I went to work, came home, stared at the wall. Then I started collecting everything I could find about her life. Photos from social media. Posts from friends. Obituaries. I wanted to know her at least in this way: through others’ memories, through the fragments she left behind.”
“And what did you find?”
“A lot. I learned she worked as an accountant in a small firm. That she loved to cook—friends posted pictures of her pies. That she adored reading detective novels and watching old movies. That she was a wonderful mother—everyone wrote that, everyone who knew her.”
Dasha swallowed the lump in her throat. Yes, Mom loved detective stories. And pies. And old black-and-white movies that they watched together on weekends, wrapped in a blanket.
“But then I found something else,” Natalya continued. “Among the photos her friends posted, there was one. A strange one. Old, scanned. It showed your mother, very young, about twenty. And she was holding a piece of paper. I enlarged the image, tried to read what was written there. And I made out a few words.”
She stood up, went to the desk, and took out a printout from the folder—an enlarged fragment of a photograph. She handed it to Dasha.
In the picture was her mother. Young, smiling. With a short haircut that Dasha had only seen in old photos. She was holding some kind of document. The image was blurry, but a few words were legible: “Inquiry… Archive… Information on birth…”
“It’s an inquiry to an archive,” Natalya said quietly. “Your mother was looking for information about her birth. She knew, Dasha. Or at least, she suspected.”
“What? But Dad said… Your father said Mom didn’t remember anything. That Grandma Raya raised her as her own, and Olya was never interested in the past.”
“But that’s not true. This photo was taken about a year before you were born, according to the comment from the friend who posted it. This means your mother was searching for the truth about her origins even before she became pregnant with you.”
Dasha looked at the photograph and felt something tighten in her chest. Mom was searching. Mom wanted to know. And someone stopped her. Or she found nothing and gave up.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “If Mom was searching, why didn’t she find you? Why didn’t she learn the truth?..”
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