Chapter 5
Chapter Five
By the time she’d finished dinner with her brothers and sister, Matilda had sobered up a little bit. But she still felt like dropping directly into bed and yawned as she climbed out of the taxi to walk into the bar where she was meeting Cam. It wasn’t as crowded as the restaurant had been, with only a few people grouped in clusters around the darkened space.
Cam waited in a booth at the far end of the room and waved when she approached. He stood to kiss her, then she sat across from him. The brown faux leather seats squeaked as she shifted position.
“What would you like to drink?” he asked.
She glanced at the bar. “A Tom Collins please.”
“I’ll be right back.”
He soon returned with their drinks. A beer for him and a lemon flavoured cocktail for her. He wore his light brown hair long, with it pulled back into a messy bun at the nape of his neck. His glasses were black-rimmed and his style was in line with most of the young men of his age in the city—skinny jeans with a black t-shirt.
They’d dated for two years, but it felt shorter than that. Had they ever been serious? She’d thought they were, but after so much time together, he still hadn’t spoken about the future or plans for moving their relationship to the next level in a long time. And she’d hadn’t brought it up either. Perhaps because she didn’t want to. If she was honest with herself, she couldn’t imagine marrying him. But dating was comfortable. She enjoyed his company, they were a good match on paper. It would be a mistake to end things simply because she wasn’t head over heels. Wouldn’t it?
She sipped her drink and smiled at him. “How was work?”
He shrugged. “This project is going to be the death of us. The whole team is exhausted. I feel like I haven’t seen you much in weeks. The deadline is Tuesday, so we’ll probably be working all weekend. Sorry, that reminds me, I’m going to have to cancel our beach outing on Saturday.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “I understand. Hopefully you get this finished and can take a break.”
He nodded. “That’s the plan.”
“Remember me telling you about that DNA test I did?”
He gulped a mouthful of beer before replying. “Uh huh.”
“I think I’m going to pursue it. Find out what happened there. I need to know the truth.”
“That could be dangerous. You might find something you don’t want to know.”
Why was everyone so against her looking into the results? “You don’t think I can handle it?”
He sighed. “That’s not what I’m saying. Although, if it does turn out that you’re not related to your family, that could cause some real angst.”
“I know that.” She stared at her Tom Collins. “But I’ve got to do it anyway. Now that it’s out there, I won’t ever be able to put it behind me until I figure it out.”
He leaned back against the upholstery. “Why don’t you upload your DNA to one of those sites that tells you who your family are?”
“Do you think that’s the best approach?”
“Why not? If you really want the truth, that’s probably the fast-track method to get there.”
Nerves jangled in her gut. If she did this, there’d be no turning back. She hated the idea of not being related to her siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins. They were her family, all she had. And that link felt more and more tenuous the longer she considered the possibility that it was false.
“Okay, I suppose that would be a good place to start.”
He smiled. “Now, let’s talk about Sunday. We were meant to go to that Jazz festival with Gemma and Bart, but…”
“You’re working?” she interjected.
He nodded.
A week later, Matilda was in the middle of treating a client when the text message came in. She heard her phone buzz but couldn’t get to it in that moment. A long-time patient, a golden-haired cocker spaniel, was there to be euthanised, and her owner was sobbing silently.
“I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes and then we’ll be underway,” Matilda said quietly, one hand on the client’s arm.
The client nodded, sniffled into a handkerchief. Matilda quietly slipped out the door, then retrieved her phone from the pocket of her long, white coat. The message was from the genetic tracing website she’d submitted her DNA to after her conversation with Cam.
Her heart skipped a beat. When she opened this message, it might turn her world upside down. Was she ready for that?
She hurried to her office and shut the door, then sat in the closest chair.
The message was brief, giving her a link to click for a full report. When she opened it, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at for a minute. Then, it all became clear.
The report showed only one close relative connection, and that relative was in the United States, in a place called Covington, Georgia. And the connection was a cousin.
How? What? She shook her head, narrowed her eyes at the screen. That couldn’t be right. She had a cousin in Georgia? She’d read the fine print. Unless a person was also listed on this website with their DNA profile, the connection wouldn’t show up. Her brothers and sister in Australia had never submitted their results to this website, so she wasn’t expecting them to be linked to her. But her initial DNA report had already ruled that out, if it was correct.
The possibility of a cousin on the other side of the world made her head spin. She couldn’t wrap her mind around how that was possible. Her uncle had spent some time in the USA when he was in the military. Perhaps something had happened then, and he hadn’t mentioned it to his family out of embarrassment. Or maybe he didn’t know.
Did this mean her uncle had an affair?
She had to pay a fee to see the name of the cousin on the website. She did that, and then studied the name for a moment.
Tyler Osbourne.
There it was again, the name Osbourne. The same name that’d been listed in the DNA report. She said his name out loud, then shoved her phone in her pocket. On her way back to the examination room, she made a decision. She wanted to talk to Tyler, find out about him. He was her cousin, according to the DNA results. And it was time she learned the truth. It seemed she’d been lied to for the past twenty-five years. And she didn’t want to go one more birthday without knowing her birth family.
At home later that night, she stared at the family connection report on her laptop. With a half-drunk glass of red wine in hand, she typed his name into the search bar.
There were far too many results. So she added Covington Georgia . And a cafe was the first result. The Honeysuckle Cafe. It sounded nice. She wasn’t sure why the search engine had chosen the cafe for her results, it didn’t include Tyler’s name anywhere on the website. She scrolled through it, looking for clues. Then, on the About page, she saw another Osbourne.
The cafe’s owner shared a last name with Tyler—Rita Osbourne. And the cafe was located in Covington. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Or maybe it was, and the search algorithm didn’t know what it was talking about. But still, whoever this Rita person was, she might know Tyler. Unless Covington was a big place, she had no idea. She wasn’t even quite sure where Georgia was located on the map.
She pulled up a map then located Georgia right above Florida in the south-eastern corner of the United States of America. She didn’t know much about that part of the world. Wasn’t Gone with the Wind set it Georgia? She’d loved that book when she was eighteen. She’d had a stage of reading as many historical classics as she could get her hands on when she was about fourteen. And that particular book had stood out to her as something special.
The cafe website had a phone number listed at the bottom of the About page. On a whim, she picked up her phone and dialled. The number didn’t work. Since it was an international call, she likely had to use some kind of country code. She looked it up, and then added the prefix. This time the phone rang.
It rang ten times, and she was about to hang up when someone answered. The woman sounded sleepy.
“Hello, Honeysuckle Cafe, this is Rita.”
Matilda hesitated. She wasn’t sure what to say now that she had the person on the phone. “Oh, uh, hi. My name is Matilda…”
“Huh? honey, you’re gonna have to speak up. I can’t hear you.”
She cleared her throat and raised her voice. “I’m Matilda, from Australia. And I was calling to ask if you know a man called Tyler Osbourne.”
“There’s something wrong with this dang phone. I can’t hear much but gobbly-de-gook. And if you’re selling somethin’, I’m not buying. Have a great day, honey.”
The phone line disconnected, and Matilda stared at the wall for a few long moments. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t call a cafe on the other side of the world and ask the woman who owned it whether she knew her biological cousin. The United States was a big place, and Osbourne was a common surname. What she really should do is travel there, visit the cafe as a starting point, and see where the breadcrumbs led. If they led anywhere at all. Surely, if she had her feet on the ground there, she would be able to track down her cousin.