Edie receives her DNA results in early February 2018, while she and Jeremy were neck-deep in annual preparations to captain a large float in the infamously irreverent Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade. She initially ignores Ancestry’s email, only to be sucker-punched by its iPhone app at work the next day. "John Hart is your father" is seared in her memory. This bombshell, thanks to Ancestry’s common-relative feature, separates Edie’s paternal matches from those that could help solve the puzzle on her mother’s side.

Jeremy also introduces Edie’s "other parents," the Wagleys, an otherwise childless couple who always treated her like she was their own daughter. Edie tends to the affairs of Earle Wagley with weekly trips to the ninety-five-year-old widow’s Maringouin home. The chapter closes with Edie confounded by two weeks of futilely trying to identify which of the myriad John Harts in the world is her father.

Get your signed edition of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery at LittleGirlBook.com. Follow The Little Girl on social media @littlegirlbook. Subscribe to The Little Girl Book Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Audio editing and production by Michael Thibodeaux and the Rep Cap team