I didn’t say anything for a long time. I couldn’t. I just kept looking back and forth between the man in the photograph and the man sitting across from me.
“Greg doesn’t have a brother,” I finally said. “Greg’s an only child. His father walked out when he was two years old. His mother raised him by herself. He never even knew his father’s name.”
“I know,” Elliot said. “Neither did I. Not until last year.”
He picked up the glass of water the waiter had left at the empty place setting and took a long drink. His hand wasn’t quite steady.
“Our father left Greg’s mother in 1975,” he said. “He moved to Ohio. Married my mother two years later. I was born in ‘78. He never told us he had another son. Not once. I didn’t find out until I was forty-six years old.”
“How?”
Elliot almost smiled.
“One of those DNA kits. The kind you spit in a tube and mail off.”
My heart skipped.
“Last Christmas,” I said slowly. “Our daughter gave Greg one of those kits. As a joke. Because he always said he had no idea where his family came from. She wanted him to find out if he was Irish or Italian or whatever.”
“She did,” Elliot said. “And he found out a lot more than that.”
He reached into his pocket again. This time he pulled out his phone. He tapped the screen a few times and turned it toward me.
It was a message. From a genealogy website. Dated last March.
“You have a new DNA match: Gregory Whitman. Predicted relationship: Half-sibling. Shared DNA: 24%.”
“I sent him a message first,” Elliot said. “He didn’t answer for almost a month. Then one night, he wrote back. Just one line. He said, ‘I think we need to talk.’”
“Last March,” I repeated. My mind was racing back through the calendar. Last March. Last spring.
“We met in April,” Elliot said. “At a diner off the interstate, halfway between his town and mine. We sat in a booth for four hours. He brought a picture of you. And one of your daughter. Sophie, right?”
I nodded. I couldn’t speak.
“He was so proud of you two,” Elliot said. “He kept pulling out his phone and showing me pictures. Sophie’s high school graduation. You at the beach in a big floppy hat. You and him on your twentieth anniversary at some Italian restaurant.”
“Luigi’s,” I whispered. “He took me to Luigi’s.”
Elliot nodded.
“He was so happy that day. He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe I have a brother. I can’t believe I have a brother.’ Like a little kid on Christmas morning.” He looked down at the photo on the table. “And then he asked me about our father.”
The piano music stopped. The pianist was taking a break. In the sudden quiet, I could hear the ocean through the window, a low, steady hush against the side of the ship.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
Elliot took a long breath.
“I told him the truth,” he said. “I told him our father died in 2003. In a nursing home in Dayton, Ohio. He was fifty-nine years old.”
He tapped the photograph gently with one finger.
“I told him our father had Huntington’s disease.”
I had heard of it. Barely. Something you heard about on a TV medical show or read about in a waiting-room magazine. Something rare. Something that happened to other people.
“What is that?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
Elliot’s eyes met mine. They were Greg’s eyes. Full of the same sad kindness Greg’s had been full of the night he walked out of our kitchen.
“It’s a disease that slowly destroys your brain,” he said. “Your body stops doing what you tell it to. You start dropping things. Your hands move on their own. You get angry for no reason. You forget things. You lose your balance. Then you lose your ability to walk. To talk. To swallow. To recognize the people you love.”
My hands were shaking so hard now that I had to put them flat on the tablecloth to keep them still.
“And it’s genetic,” he said quietly. “If one of your parents has it, you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it too.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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