Chapter Text
Maura Isles looked down at her Casio watch and sighed. She’d agreed to meet with a student outside her office hours, and now she couldn’t remember why. The girl had been remarkable enough to remember; incredibly smart, but she’d completed all her coursework last semester and obviously didn’t need help. She’d been quick, intelligent and diligent. A good combination in a student.
Maura sipped the last of her coffee, since she’d been early, and took in the surroundings of The Green Beet café in the medical building on campus. It was close enough to her office, and she had the time to figure out what this student wanted. Often it was a referral they needed, or feedback, or even just an opinion on some thesis work for another class. Maura knew she was too lenient about these kinds of requests, but there had been something about this Cailin that had Maura curious. She looked up to see the girl in question approach her table with her own coffee and a second; she must have asked the barista what Maura drank. It was touching; most students weren’t that thoughtful, or they were in financial loans up to the eyeballs. She was aware Cailin had a scholarship to the University of Toronto, that her mother was someone big in the medical community, but it was only peripheral to Maura’s own work in biology. She still lived on the little property upstate in Ontario that she’d grown up on, still had her chickens and bees.
“Cailin, hello. What do you need?” Maura asked when Cailin sat down opposite her, still wondering why one of the students who had completed their coursework would contact her for a meeting.
“Um, I had a question to ask. Now that I’m not your student anymore.”
Maura looked her over. Cailin was young; so young, barely in her twenties, if that, to Maura’s early thirties. She was very pretty, with long brown hair and haunting hazel eyes. It struck her, since this had happened before, that her former student might be hitting on her, or might be trying to ask her out.
It was ridiculous, she was so young, and Maura was straight.
Maura was straight, wasn’t she? Maura had become less certain of that as the years had gone by, along with the men she’d dated without much interest. If she could find someone who treated her the way her best friend Jane treated her, she would marry them in a heartbeat. Jane had said something along the same lines about Maura, as a joke once years ago, and Maura had considered for a moment what being married to Jane would be like.
When she let herself think about it, she thought it would be nice. She was pretty sure that was the way all women felt about their best friends, though. Getting to live together and cook together and spend as much time together as they could. It would be like having a housemate who cared about her.
But Jane had made it clear that she wasn’t attracted to Maura, and Maura didn’t know any women that were attracted to her. She looked at Cailin again. She really was too young to consider; they were in completely different life stages.
“If you are wishing to pursue a relationship outside of the university, I’m afraid my contract doesn’t allow me to date students who have attended any of my classes until they have officially graduated from the entirety of their course. I believe you still have a year to go on your degree, so you would need to transfer if you were seriously pursuing me. I must inform you that I am not in the market for a serious relationship with a woman at the moment, and I don’t expect to be any time soon.”
Satisfied that she had correctly interpreted the situation, Maura leaned back and sipped her coffee, watching the younger woman sputter out hers, her face pale.
“Oh, gross, no. I’m not trying to hit on you. Oh, gross.”
Maura was a little hurt and offended; she knew she was attractive, and she’d specifically remembered seeing this particular former student watch her like a hawk watched movement under the snow, like an alligator watched the banks of a river. To be called gross for what was a fair assumption was a little insulting, but it reminded her of why dealt in science and cold hard facts instead of guesswork. It must have shown on her face, because once Cailin was done fiddling with something in her bag, she paled again.
“Not that you’re gross. I mean, yeah, it’s gross, but only because we’re… I think we’re…” Cailin pushed over some paperwork, which Maura took, careful to avoid Cailin’s fingers.
It was from one of the companies that did DNA testing; she looked over the profile of Cailin, and the spare on the sheet. She didn’t need to read the report to realise the implications.
“We’re related.” Maura said. She looked up to examine Cailin with more interest than she’d previously afforded the young woman. Now that she knew, she could see a slight resemblance. Cailin had the plump cheeks of a youth, but beneath those were familiar cheekbones, a familiar eye orbit, a familiar zygomatic arch. She dressed in loose, earth-toned, flowing clothes, and her shoulders were broader than Maura’s when they weren’t slumped. “Closely related. Our grandparents were the same.”
“Closer than that. I didn’t expect to find this—or you, honestly.” Cailin looked nervous, and Maura was starting to feel that way as well. “I just took the test to see if I’m at any risk for genetic cancer, and I got the full package. And then I got a match that said I had a relative at the parent level—a half-sibling. And I know my dad left shortly after I was born, so I wondered if he’d had another family before he met mum, or if he maybe one he liked better. Then I remembered. My mum said she’d been pregnant when she was a teenager and that the baby died. I don’t know how far along she was or anything, she didn’t want to talk about it, she was just telling me to be ‘careful’ when I went on a date in high school, and it obviously hurt her to even mention it. I didn’t expect anything when I did the test, but I found you. Your details were there and said you were willing to be contacted.”
Maura drew in a deep breath. If Cailin was right, Maura was her half-sister. She had family. She wondered how much to reveal; the girl was still technically a student, but she was family too.
“When my parents died I didn’t find any adoption paperwork. I found a contract, and my birth certificate had the names of the people who raised me on it. The contract was that they would never tell me who I was, or who my family was. The people who wrote it, were a couple—an older couple. They died a few years before my parents—my adopted—my parents—died, so I never got to meet them. I thought they were my parents. I looked them up—your grandparents, I mean, and found out they had a son. I never contacted him; it would have been too hard. I never found their other daughter. She’d disappeared long before I’d even started looking, and I was never able to find her. But I thought she was my sister.”
“Well, if she was forced to give you up or didn’t know you’d survived, you can’t blame her for disappearing. I never met my grandparents; she was always very protective of me. Overly protective. Like if she let me out of her sight for a minute something might happen to me. She might not have even known what happened to you, if her parents did all the paperwork. You’re the right age for the baby she thought she lost. I think we’re sisters.”
Maura thought back to the letters her parents had received from Cailin’s grandparents and hidden over the years, the thick bundle overwhelming her when she found it stashed in a cabinet in the attic. The letters always sounded cold and distant but still reaching out. Her parents had kept them, as well as gifts of money to buy things for Maura on Christmas and her birthday. Her birth certificate must have been forged, or they must have registered her as their biological child, because legally she had been theirs for all intents and purposes. Maura had never bothered to adjust her documentation because she couldn’t prove it, and both sets of parents were dead now. She didn’t want to exhume them, but these DNA tests would be enough now to prove she’d been illegally taken from her family, along with the letters.
If her mother was alive and out there, in Toronto, the same city, almost, since Maura technically lived in Essa—Maura held her breath. She took in every familiar and foreign feature of the student in front of her.
“Your mother?” Maura asked finally, wondering about her the way she used to a few years ago, when she’d found out.
“I didn’t tell her yet. That I found you, I mean. I don’t know how she’d take it. I didn’t know how you’d take it, if you had a family you liked or anything. I enrolled in your classes just to see if it could be true and what you were like, then I found myself interested. You’re a good professor, by the way.”
“Thanks.” Maura was unsure what to do with that compliment.
“Um, here,” Cailin said awkwardly, handing over her phone. “That’s, um. That’s my mum. Our mother, I suppose. I mean, look at her. You look just like her.” Maura took the phone; the woman on the screen was in her fifties, and she had the same cheekbones as the girl in front of her, the same cheekbones as Maura herself. She was smiling, but her grip on Cailin was a little too tight. Maura wondered what it would feel like to have that arm around her, to have this woman in her life. She shook her head and handed back the phone.
“She’s lovely. Thank you for showing me.”
“Would you mind if I took a photo of you? In case I can think of a way to tell her. I don’t want to hurt her.”
“Neither do I,” Maura agreed. It hurt her enough to know that her grandparents had taken her from this woman, who’d apparently wanted her. “Of course.”
“I could just use your photo from the college website, but she might be able to find you with a reverse image search. She’s tech-savvy, unfortunately.”
Maura laughed, and Cailin took the photo then, turning the screen to get Maura’s approval.
“If she doesn’t want to meet me, would you mind still seeing me?” Maura asked uncertainly, and Cailin immediately nodded.
“You’re my sister, of course I want to get to know you,” Cailin said, and Maura felt herself relax, realising how tense she’d been, how much the answer had mattered to her. She sipped her coffee—room temperature now—and nodded.
“You know more about me than I do about you. I’m a professor of biology here at the University of Toronto; I keep chickens and bees, and I don’t date students.”
Cailin laughed, and Maura relaxed a little more.
“I’m studying to be a doctor. I want to do a little humanitarian work while I’m young and travel for a while. I don’t date my professors. My mother is a doctor too, she used to travel up north to the really remote indigenous communities, which is why I love to travel. I grew up part of the time on the tundra, and part of the time in the big cities.” Cailin shrugged, finishing her coffee. “And I have a sister, I guess. Can I have your number? I’m not hitting on you.” Cailin’s smirk was cheeky, and Maura rolled her eyes.
“You’d be surprised,” Maura said dryly.
“I wouldn’t. I have eyes, and you had that speech locked and loaded. I’m guessing you get propositioned a lot.”
Maura chuckled as she added herself to Cailin’s contact and called herself, saving Cailin in her phone as ‘annoying little sister (Cailin)’. She handed back Cailin’s paperwork and her phone.
“I should get back to studying. It was nice to see you.”
Maura finished her coffee and stood, shouldering her purse. She needed to get back to her office for the rest of her student hours, but the coffee date had blown any idea of her appointments for that afternoon away. She would have to look up the student notes and prep herself in the next… she checked her watch… fifteen minutes.
“Thank you for being… gentle… in the way you approached this.” Maura said, finally, unable to put to words how much processing she was doing.
“I’ll call you next week, if that’s okay.” Cailin looked unsure of herself for the first time, and Maura nodded quickly, glad that she’d known she’d been adopted or stolen or whatever had happened so fast in that first week of her life. It hadn’t been such a shock, and there was no one left alive to confront, no other answers to get other than what this Hope Martin could piece together from well over thirty years ago. Maura nodded again and stepped forward quickly.
She wasn’t allowed to hug one of her students, but Cailin had passed her classes already. Maura was allowed to hug her sister.
Cailin hesitated, but she brought her arms up too, and Maura struggled to keep her eyes open. The first time someone related to her had touched her in living memory. Maura moved away first, unused to physical affection from anyone but Jane and her family, and Cailin nodded this time, her tongue wetting her lips.
“I’ll find a way to tell mum,” Cailin promised, and then she was gone.
***
Maura spent her student hours in her office, tapping her lips with her finger, looking up the family she had lost on the internet. Hope had an illustrious career, and Maura herself had referenced some of her material without ever knowing she had a connection to its author.
She should have been shocked. She should have been shaken. But it made sense, somehow. The people who had handed her over to the Isles family had been too old to be her parents, unless she was a late in life baby. It made more sense that her grandparents had taken baby Maura from their daughter with no intent to raise Maura themselves. The letters betrayed that the two families had been close friends leading up to the adoption, at which point they had distanced themselves, perhaps to keep Maura away from Hope, or Hope away from Maura.
If Hope had been told Maura had died, it made sense that she hadn’t been looking for her. And Maura hadn’t been looking under the name Hope had used once she’d left her family, and she’d changed it again when she’d gotten married.
Maura looked at the woman on the screen. She was dignified and gorgeous. Maura hoped she would look like that too at her age.