Page 15 of The Hampton Beach Café 4
Frances explained their lunch from the week before and recounted how she had noticed the striking resemblance between herself and Kennedy in the old family photographs.
Pulling them out of her purse, she laid them on the table and lit up her phone screen to show Alex their photo from all those years ago.
She did not like how his face softened, and her stomach tingled watching him as he realized which photo was on her background.
Alex listened attentively, nodding along as Frances continued to speak and exclaiming in disbelief when she told him Kennedy’s theory about William’s true paternity and why Kennedy’s dad had left them.
“And just to top it all off, this fresh off the farm tourist waiter guy at the restaurant asked me if she was my sister out of the clear blue sky! It’s just…”
“Wow,” he said when she finished. “That's a lot to take in.”
Frances looked up at him, searching his face for any indication of what he might be thinking. The silence was almost painful.
“Do you think I'm crazy?” she blurted out.
“No, not at all,” Alex said, reaching across the table to take her hand. “I think it's natural to have questions about your family history, and especially when you’ve come across the sort of stuff you have about your dad…”
Frances felt her heart flutter at the touch of his hand. She couldn't believe how kind and understanding he was being when she had been ranting for ten full minutes.
“What will you do about it?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know…but I can't just keep wondering if Kennedy is really my sister,” Frances said, her voice shaking slightly. “I need to know the truth…and after everything she’s been through with William and her mom, all the pain my dad caused, I think she should too.”
“And how exactly are you planning to do that?”
She took in a deep breath—this was where she might lose him. She had almost lost herself when she’d come to this conclusion a few days ago.
“I’m going try and get a DNA test done.”
“Because you’re such close friends now she’ll just hand over her toothbrush?”
Yikes. She didn’t like the tone of disapproval in his voice.
“No…but we aren’t as bad as we were. She apologized, you know, for being so horrible in high school.”
“Huh,” he said thoughtfully.
Alex took a sip of his coffee and looked around the café.
“What about here? We could run a taste test here at the café, get a sample discreetly and without attracting any attention.”
Frances raised an eyebrow, intrigued. “How would that work?”
“We can use two of our own coffee blends and mark the cups,” Alex explained. “Then, we both take a sip of each coffee and swish it around in a bit before spitting it out into a tissue. We can then send those tissues to one of those at home DNA kit labs for analysis and see if the DNA profiles match.”
Frances grimaced.
“That's clever. But that’s not really how those tests work. They send sterile cotton swabs, and you’re supposed to run them around your mouth.”
Alex pursed his lips as he thought. The expression left him looking like someone’s idea of a male model—
Oh, come on,she thought,what is with this today?
Shaking off the image of Alex pouting in five hundred dollar board shorts, Frances leaned forward as he started to speak.
“What about flavoring thing? Like we’re trying different sweeteners, syrups—blah blah blah, but one is blank. She sticks it on her tongue and says she can’t taste anything, so we put it aside into the ‘definitely not’ category…”
That might actually work.
