The laptop sat on the coffee table like an oracle waiting to be consulted.
Jess was cross-legged on the floor, a glass of wine balanced on the rug beside her, while Cece occupied the armchair with the good sightline to the screen and the skeptical expression she’d been wearing since Robby arrived.
“I found a genealogy website,” Jess said, typing.
“It’s one of those ones where you put in a name and it tries to connect you to everyone who’s ever shared a continent.
I put in Day on my mother’s side and Pollack on my grandmother’s, and now it’s doing its little loading dance.”
“It’s not going to find anything tonight,” Cece said.
“The results take a week.”
“I know the results take a week.
I’m not looking for results.
I’m looking for context.”
“Context is how anxiety makes itself at home.”
Jess ignored her and kept typing.
The laptop hummed.
Robby sat on the other end of the couch, close enough to see the screen, far enough not to crowd her.
Winston had wandered in from the kitchen with a bowl of popcorn and was watching the genealogy search like it was a sport.
“This is exciting,” Winston said.
“We’re witnessing history.
Either Robby is a relative or he’s not.
Either way, we’ll have a story for the next game night.”
“Winston, please don’t narrate this like a nature documentary.”
“I can’t help it.
The tension is real.
The Pollack line hangs in the balance.”
Jess hit enter.
The website churned for a moment, and then a family tree began to populate, names and dates and thin gray lines connecting people Robby had never heard of to people Jess had mentioned once.
The tree grew branches.
Names appeared.
Great-aunts, great-uncles, second cousins, a whole ecosystem of people who’d lived and married and died without knowing they were being watched from a loft in LA.
And then a name appeared that made the room go quiet.
A woman’s name.
A maiden name.
A thread connecting the Pollack side of Jess’s mother’s family to a branch labeled McFerrin.
The room went quiet around the screen.
“Huh,” Winston said, in the tone of someone who’d just watched a safe land on a cartoon character.
Jess’s hand had stopped moving on the trackpad.
Her face was unreadable, not upset, not calm, just processing, the way long-division happens before the answer arrives.
Cece leaned forward in her chair, wine forgotten.
“It’s not confirmed,” Jess said slowly.
“It’s just — a suggestion.
A link the algorithm found because the names are similar.
It doesn’t mean —”
“It’s a Pollack link,” Cece said.
“Right there.
Your grandmother’s maiden name, connected to a McFerrin marriage in 1962.”
“I can read, Cece.”
“Then you can see what it says.”
Robby looked at the screen.
The thread was thin, tentative, the kind of connection a genealogy website makes when it’s guessing.
But it was there.
McFerrin.
Pollack.
Linked by a marriage certificate from thirty years before any of them were born.
Every head in the room had turned toward the screen.
The popcorn sat forgotten in Winston’s lap.
Cece had set her wine down.
Even Ferguson, the cat, seemed to be watching: one slow blink, then another, the kind of blink that meant he was filing this information for later use.
The genealogy website’s algorithm had done what algorithms do: connected two data points and let the humans do the emotional work.
The room was waiting for him to react.
He could feel it: the held breath, the collective brace, the weight of every cousin-twist in every story everyone had ever heard, pulling the room toward the expected shape.
This is the moment the guy panics.
This is where it gets real.
He didn’t panic.
“We’re already testing it,” he said.
“The appointment’s next Tuesday.
Lab 3.
We’ll know for sure in a week and a half.”
Jess turned to look at him.
Her eyes were wide, the way they got when she was holding something heavy.
“You’re not — you’re calm about this.”
“I’m calm about it because we’re testing it.
If the website’s right, we’ll know.
If it’s wrong, we’ll know.
The waiting is the part that matters, and we’re already in it.”
“But what if that’s the real thing.
What if the Pollack connection is —”
“Then we’ll have a very specific answer and a very funny story about how we almost didn’t need the test.”
The silence that followed was different from the one before.
Less tectonic.
More like a room settling back into its foundation.
Cece was watching him.
Not with the warmth she’d offered earlier, but with something sharper: a read in progress, a file being opened.
She’d clocked his composure, and she wasn’t sure yet whether it was maturity or something else.
“That’s a very chill response to potentially dating your cousin,” she said.
“It’s not potentially.
It’s possibly, pending lab results.
There’s a difference.”
“Most people would be panicking.”
“Most people didn’t already book the test.”
Winston pointed a piece of popcorn at Robby.
“I like his system.
He pre-empts the crisis.
That’s good tracking data.”
“Winston, please don’t —”
“Adding it to the index.”
Jess let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.
She closed the laptop, set it aside, and picked up her wine.
The room’s temperature had shifted, not back to where it was before the Pollack name appeared, but to somewhere new.
Somewhere with a possibility in it.
“I’m going to need you to keep that energy for the next week and a half,” she said to Robby.
“I can do that.”
“Full composure.
No spiraling.”
“I don’t spiral.
I over-explain.
Different thing.”
“Fine.
No over-explaining.”
“I’ll do my best.”
She looked at him for a long moment: the same look Cece had given him, but softer, with more hope in it.
Then she smiled, small and real, and turned back to the closed laptop.
Winston broke the silence by eating a piece of popcorn loud enough to be a statement.
“Well.
This is either going to be the best first-date story ever told or the most awkward Thanksgiving dinner of all time.
Either way, I’m fully invested.”
“That’s a very Winston way to process existential dread,” Cece said.
“I process all dread through snacks and data.
It’s a holistic system.”
Across the room, Cece had picked her wine back up, but she wasn’t drinking it.
She was watching Robby over the rim of the glass, the way you watch a person whose math you haven’t finished yet.
Her read of him had shifted, from pleasant to something unreadable, a file she’d opened and couldn’t close.
The Pollack name sat in the air between them, unconfirmed, unresolved.
Robby’s private verification problem was now the whole loft’s pre-grief, loud and public.
And the countdown to Tuesday had only just begun.
hey — quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
every chapter the second i finish writing it.
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P.S.
— in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.