Chapter 48

What is it you’re supposed to do when you can’t sleep? Is it get up and do something else or continue to lay there? Sol has so many thoughts running through her head, thinking about Janice in the hospital, Shyla’s sobs, dating apps, her own identity, and everything that has happened in the past couple of months. She tries the deep breathing technique she learned from Willow. Sometimes it works, but she finds she’s impatient. It’s definitely not working tonight. She decides to get up and make some tea. Jericho follows her to the kitchen, and she gives him a treat. “You’re a good friend, Coco.”

While she waits for the water to boil, she again starts thinking about how no one really understands everything she’s going through. They’re trying to be supportive, and that’s awesome, but they can only go so far. Who can she talk to about all this? Then she remembers that Thea had texted her the links for some support groups. Which one would be most helpful right now? Is it remotely possible that one of them has a member that has a newly discovered biological relative in the hospital? She decides to check out the one for the people finding some unexpected stuff from DNA tests. Someone must have at least found out they were a different ethnicity than expected. That’s definitely on her mind from setting up her new dating profile.

She starts looking around on one of the sites. All of the people’s stories are about finding out they have a different father. Or finding out they were adopted altogether. She almost forgot how unusual her story is to have a different mother but to be with her biological father. Except she knows some babies are raised by another family member while the mother takes on the role of a sister or aunt. It’s just so complicated.

The one thing that she sees over and over again is that it’s a traumatic event to find this out when you’re older. Your whole life people have been withholding the truth from you or lying to you outright. And that’s what you’ve built a life on. When she reads that, she immediately identifies with it—trauma. The urgency of Janice’s situation has consumed a lot of her thoughts, and she knows this will take a while to untangle anyway. She thinks about how things may have been different if she had found out—Mom had just told her, for instance—without all of this other stuff going on. What she would have done or thought or how she would have processed everything. She thinks about calling Thea but it’s way too late. She keeps clicking around on the site and sees there’s a private group she can join. Before she can change her mind, she fills out the application. After this small action toward taking care of herself, she decides to try to go back to bed and see if she can sleep.