Investigators obtained a DNA sample from the young woman. It was a simple, almost anticlimactic procedure — a swab, a lab, a waiting period — for a question that had gone unanswered for eighteen years. On one side was a family in Florida who had never stopped wondering. On the other was a young woman in South Carolina who didn't yet know she had anything to wonder about. The answer, when it came, would not just confirm an identity. It would rewrite one.
