Page 32 of The Little Provence Book Shop
He laughed, passed his coffee to Adeline with one hand, then wrapped his arms tightly around his niece. ‘Hello to you too!’ he said.
She pulled back. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Your mum was just asking me the same thing,’ he said, grinning. ‘I guess I just missed you both too much.’
Lili giggled and cuddled into him again, planting an enormous kiss on his cheek. ‘Do you want to see my bedroom? And I go to school here. They all talk French! I can show you my books. And I’m reading bigger books now – did Mum tell you? And here we eat chocolate for breakfast, and I read books after school and Mum lets me sit in her shop and draw on Saturdays. And there’s a market and the people are lovely and I have a best friend…’ she rattled, barely stopping for breath.
‘Come on, let Uncle Kevin drink his coffee,’ Adeline laughed, peeling her daughter from her brother and sitting her on her lap instead. ‘I expect he’s tired after his journey.’
Kevin looked grateful. ‘Why don’t you go get your schoolbooks and you can show me once I’ve finished my breakfast?’ he suggested.
Lili didn’t need telling twice. She raced from the room and they chuckled together at the sound of her little feet pounding up the stairs.
Silence descended around them, broken only by Kevin slurping his coffee in the way he always had done. It was funny, the sound had used to annoy her as a child and teen, but now, far away from home, there was something comforting about his inability to consume a hot drink without making a ridiculous amount of noise. Adeline found herself smiling at him.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing. Just missed you, I suppose. And you were right. What I found out. It doesn’t change anything. Not between us. You’ll always be my weird, disgusting big brother.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ He gave her a grin. ‘And on that note, I wondered whether… well, I kind of hoped that I might persuade you to come home.’
‘Come home?’ Something dipped inside her chest.
He shrugged. ‘This seems lovely, for a break. But you rushed here without a thought. Ran away, kind of. You’re so far away from your family – well, me – and your old life. Lili’s friends. I wondered if maybe it was time to knock this French thing on the head; to come back to reality.’
It was like a slap. ‘Thisisreality!’ Adeline said, her voice sounding sharper than she’d intended.
‘I know, sorry, this is coming out all wrong.’ He pulled his backpack towards him and began to open the zip one-handed, before setting his coffee down and opening it properly, rummaging through. ‘What I meant was, you found this shocking, awful information. This job came up… somehow. You rushed off. And I completely understand you wanting to find out more about this area, about your… well, your roots. I’m all for it. But is tucking yourself away here… Well, you’re not going to find any answers working in a little backstreet bookshop are you, Addy?’
She opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again.
Kevin was still intent on his bag. ‘I get it,’ he said, glancing up before returning to the messy interior of his backpack. ‘I understand that you want to find out who you are. Well, whoelseyou are. I thought about it a lot over the last few weeks and I reckon I’d be the same. But I hate thinking of you living alone here, trying to find that missing part of you.’ He was gabblingslightly and her anger subsided; she felt his discomfort and was sorry for him.
‘Spit it out, bro,’ she said lightly. ‘I can handle it.’
He grinned as he finally found what he was looking for and drew a white envelope out of the bag.
‘Anyway, I was racking my brains, because I knew it was a closed adoption. I mean, I think there are ways of finding things out these days; but the French element, well, it makes it all so complicated. And then I thought “Ha! Science”.’ He handed her the envelope.
She turned it over, confused, then opened it, drawing out the papers inside, the tiny plastic vial. A DNA test.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘If your birth mother’s out there, it could be a way of actually finding her. Your birth mother. Answering some of the questions.’ He shrugged. ‘I think Mum would have been all for it. If she’d had time to… well, if she were here.’
They looked at each other in mutual grief.
‘Thank you,’ she said, looking at the little container, the instructions written on glossy paper – the words ‘Priority processing’ in French showing that he’d paid for a rapid test and even gone to the French website on her behalf. ‘But Kevin, do you really think she’s going to have put herself on this DNA database? The adoption was closed; everything was secretive. Signed. Sealed. Why would someone in that situation risk putting herself out there?’
He shrugged. ‘I thought of that,’ he admitted. ‘But there might be other relatives… other routes of finding out. And I thought…’
‘Thought what?’
‘Well, you’re right. She might not be on the database. But…’
‘But…?’
‘What if sheis? What if shewantsto be found?’
