IT WAS LUNCHTIME, SO DARREN and Nova sat in the big lunch hall at the end of a table, an empty chair at one side of them separating them from the group sitting on the other end of the table talking loudly with each other. The group ignored Nova and Darren, as they always did. Darren had his laptop open and placed next to his food tray. His food tray had stood unnoticed in the same spot for most of the lunch hour, while Darren divided his attention between his laptop screen and the conversation with Nova.

"How can they even have hid this from you?" Nova asked. "They must have been planning this trip – I can't imagine they just jumped on a plane to surprise you the moment the idea came to them."

"If they'd been planning it, they'd done a good job of hiding it," Darren replied. His eyes remained fixed on the screen.

Rebecca Kingsley and Walter Cox.

"When did you say they arrived again?" Nova asked. She took another bite of a yellow substance of which she had no idea what it was, but it smelled strangely delicious.

"Saturday morning."

"So you had the entire weekend with them?"

Rebecca Kingsley and Walter Cox, Darren repeated to himself again. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he typed the first name in the search bar on Google. "Almost. They left Sunday; I said goodbye to them around noon. With the long time it takes to fly from and to Scotland, we lost much of the time we could've had together."

"That's too bad. How long is the flight?"

"Fourteen to sixteen hours. It depends on the combination of flights and stops you take. I remember I had about four hours layover in between flights when I flew here." He pressed Enter on his keyboard and within a second, thousands of results on the search term Rebecca Kingsley were displayed on his screen. What immediately caught his eye was the profile of a singer on the side that Google had set up for him. A musical artist with the name Rebecca Kingsley.

"Four hours? I've never been on a plane that long, let alone needed a flight with stops."

Could the singer be...? With a few clicks of his mouse, Darren made more information on the woman appear. She was a New York-based artist with three albums out, but what Darren was more interested in, was her age, and if she could possibly be Dakota's mother.

"You can hardly get across the Atlantic without a stop," Darren replied absent-mindedly. It was then he found the artist's age: she was almost ten years older than Dakota. While that was much older, it was not old enough to have given birth to her. This artist was a dead-end for Darren.

What was even worse about that finding was that the artist and her fame clouded the results for the person Darren was actually looking for. Instead of scrolling through the thousands of results, hoping to find a different Rebecca Kingsley than Rebecca Kingsley the singer, Darren started a new search. He typed the nine letters that made up the name Walter Cox and pressed enter.

"If only I would ever cross the Atlantic..." Nova said dreamily. "Can you imagine... Europe?"

"I can imagine Europe." Still, Darren didn't take his eyes off the screen. Google pulled up millions of results, the first one being a Wikipedia page detailing all Walter Coxes known. Most of them were old or died long ago.

"Right, of course. Darren the European." Nova rolled her eyes but chuckled. "You know how jealous everyone is of you, right? Why would you ever want to leave Europe for a dump like Jacksonville?"

Her eyes stood brightly, curious for his answer, but the answer would never come. Darren was too distracted trying to find Walter Cox, now browsing Facebook for all existing profiles with that name. There were four, two of which had never been posted on and a third that only had one picture posted, so if either of these three were Dakota's father, these profiles wouldn't help finding him. The fourth profile, however, had been recently active, showing a middle-aged man with a young girl.

"Darren?" Nova tapped the back of his laptop twice, and the screen wobbled. She caught his attention. "What are you doing anyway? Application deadlines have passed." In the weeks going up to those deadlines, they'd both been sitting in the lunch hall with their laptops open, working on their application and fine-tuning it, asking each other questions about how to phrase certain things. Because the application deadline was last Friday, there was no need to have laptops open next to the tray of food, so she wondered what occupied him.

For the first time since they'd sat down for lunch, Darren looked at Nova. Behind her curiosity, he found a hint of disappointment. "I'm sorry," he said. He pulled his laptop screen towards him but didn't close it entirely. "It's just..." He doubted how much he could say. "Do you love your family?"

Full of Latina pride, Nova replied, "Of course. With all of my heart." Unintentionally, a smile appeared on her lips, and she didn't do anything to hide it.

"Can you imagine what your life would be like without them?" This time, Darren's eyes didn't wander off to his laptop screen, and he kept his gaze fixed on his friend.

"I don't want to," was her prompt reply. "It would be a terrible world."

Darren opened up his laptop again. "Exactly." He clicked the profile of the only active Walter Cox and was happy to see the man had posted multiple photos of himself on there.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Nova asked. She only got more intrigued into Darren's business because of these questions.

He pursed his lips together, and he looked at Nova again. "Now, imagine you don't know your parents," he said.

She nodded, and her big brown eyes looking at him through her glasses did not let go of him. She didn't wear glasses often, opting for lenses instead, but Darren liked the look of them. They suited her.

"But you have a chance to get to know them."

"How?"

"You get their names from a notary on your eighteenth birthday."

She frowned. "Okay, go on."

"So, you know their names. You could look them up. Would you want to get to know them?"

She answered without a doubt. "Yes."

That was the confirmation Darren needed. With a satisfied smile, he turned back to his laptop screen and enlarged a picture on Walter Cox's profile.

"Are your questions related to something else than a preliminary hypothesis?" Nova tilted her head, and her hair bound tightly in a ponytail moved in a funny way when she did. She tried to sneak a peek of Darren's screen.

"Maybe."

She gasped. "Are you googling your parents?"

"No!" Darren turned his laptop away from Nova so she couldn't see what was on the screen. For some reason, that felt like a betrayal to Dakota. "My parents came to visit me this weekend, remember?"

"It could be that you had never met them before then." She shrugged. "That your biological parents just flew across the ocean to surprise you, and you would be like, 'Who are you?' and they would say, 'Surprise, we're your parents!' That would be the plot twist of the century!"

"Too bad it didn't happen, then." Meanwhile, Darren looked at the face looking back at him from the screen. He could be sure of one thing: this wasn't Dakota's father. The two couldn't be more different. First of all, the man lived in Indiana, so it would be strange if Dakota ended up in an orphanage a few states south. Secondly, the man's appearance was different from Dakota's in every aspect: he had thick, black hair; dark skin; and deep brown eyes. There was no resemblance with Dakota's stark-white hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. It must be a different Walter Cox, Darren concluded.

"Darren, can't you tell me what you're doing?" A sigh was heard in her words.

Darren thought about Dakota, and he wondered if she'd told anyone she was an orphan. Maybe he wasn't the only one with that knowledge, but the news about her parents had only been shared with him, he was sure. He didn't want to betray Dakota's trust by telling Nova. "I can't," he said. "I wish I could, but I can't."

"Should I worry about you?"

He shook his head. "No."

That seemed to satisfy Nova. She didn't ask any more questions, but because Darren also didn't want to give her any reason to, he closed his laptop after having shut down the Facebook search, figuring he would continue his search another time.

☆

The first opportunity to attempt to find Rebecca Kingsley and Walter Cox was after dinner, once Darren had finished up his homework and got behind his laptop. As he had been solving mathematical riddles, he had been thinking about his first attempt and how he should go about his second one, when he realized he hadn't searched for Rebecca Kingsley on Facebook yet. While Google's results were clouded by the musical artist Rebecca Kingsley, Facebook would show him all the Rebecca Kingsleys that were modern enough to have an account.

So, that's how his new search commenced. He opened up a tab, got onto Facebook, and typed in the name of Dakota's mother. Again, there were four profiles shown, and Darren immediately saw three of those were uneligible to be Dakota's mother: two accounts were inactive, and the third was a college student that could hardly be three years older than Dakota.

However, the fourth caught Darren's eye. Her profile picture didn't show much because it was taken from a distance, but Darren saw a woman and a much younger guy. They looked alike, as far as Darren could see. The woman had light skin and blond hair pulled up into a ponytail or a bun, and she tilted her head towards the boy, whose hair and skin had the same color. He seemed bored, which only made the woman laugh wholeheartedly.

Darren's eyes kept going back to her skin and her laugh. She matched the profile he had been looking for, and he could imagine her genetics having been passed down to Dakota. With a click of the mouse, he opened up a new page that gave more details on Rebecca Kingsley.

Within him, an urge rose up to cheer in excitement, thinking he'd found Dakota's mother. He shouldn't be happy yet, though, he told himself: he could only be sure that the woman in the picture's name was Rebecca Kingsley. Out of the four profiles on Facebook, she was the most likely match, but he couldn't be sure that it was the Rebecca Kingsley that had given birth to Dakota yet.

He scrolled down to look for more pictures, in hopes of finding one that would make it easier to compare the woman and Dakota. At the same time, he realized he was dealing with a new and tough question: how could he be sure this was Dakota's mother? He couldn't expect to find a post saying, 'I put my kid up for adoption eighteen years ago. If you're her, please contact me.'

The most recent picture on her profile was one of many women at what seemed to be a party. The woman in the middle held up a giant bottle of wine, and Rebecca Kingsley helped her hold it up for the picture. At least she liked parties as much as Dakota did, Darren thought. If a preference for parties was genetic, this could be proof he was looking at the right Rebecca Kingsley.

He scrolled further down, and one of the first pictures that caught his eye was a close-up of Rebecca Kingsley. It showed the woman from her shoulders up, her face without emotion but still smiling somehow. Her hair was bound in a ponytail, just like in her profile picture, and the color palette of her appearance contrasted against the black background. The picture seemed to be taken by a professional, as high-quality as it was.

"Darren?"

The only door to his room opened, and by the voice, Darren could tell Adelaide was standing behind it. Before her face appeared, he closed his laptop and turned around in his chair to face the mother of the house. He felt his heart thudding in his chest.

Once the gap in the door was big enough, she set one step inside and rested her hand to the doorpost. "What are you doing?" she asked. The sight of Darren sitting at his desk with his laptop closed confused her.

Darren laid his hand on his laptop. "Just finishing up for school." He smiled to hide his nerves. While it hadn't been his intention to make the Facebook search a secret, it had become one in his attempt to avoid questions whose answer would be in conflict with Dakota's privacy. Now, he found himself lying to his host mother.

It worked, though; the frown on her face disappeared. "Still?" She relaxed a bit. "I think I should talk to Aimee and Liam. They never work this hard on their homework, but their grades ain't close to being as good as yours either."

Darren chuckled.

"Anyway, I forgot to ask you something just now," she said, motioning to something behind her, which would be the dining room. She was talking about the dinner they'd just had with the five of them. "I have a dentist appointment Friday, but it's right during Liam's walking therapy..." She grimaced. "I would ask Aimee, but she has been planning something with her friends, and I want her to take that time for herself. Isaiah is still at work, so I was wondering..." She pleaded Darren with his eyes.

"I'll take Liam to walking therapy," Darren said without the question being explicitly asked.

"Really?" Adelaide let out a sigh of relief. "If you can't, Isaiah might be able to get home from work earlier."

"It's not a problem, I'll do it," Darren said. He was just happy he could do something in return for all the family's done for him: taking care of him for the past weeks and promising to do so for the rest of the year, and the surprise visit from his parents they organized for him. This was the littlest he could do, he figured.

"Thank you, Darren," she said. She smiled her biggest smile. "But I won't get in the way of you and your homework now." She took a step back and put her hand on the door handle, about to close the door behind her. "By the way, will you be joining us tonight? We wanted to continue Le Casa de Papel, but we don't want to start without you."

"I won't be long, I just have to finish a few things up," Darren said. He motioned towards his closed laptop, and with that, Adelaide closed the door and left him to his search again.

When he opened up his laptop, the face of Rebecca Kingsley stared back at him. It was almost as big as his own face, and for a second, he froze up in surprise, until he started looking at the woman with fresh eyes and could see the similarities between her and her presumed daughter. There was something in those eyes, those light blue eyes with specks of silver, that reminded him of Dakota's eyes as he'd seen them last Friday night close-up, when similar specks had been illuminated by the moonlight.

Darren took his phone out of his pocket and open up Instagram. He needed to make sure it wasn't his memory betraying him and that these similarities really existed. So, he opened up the app, ignored the few notifications he had, and searched for Dakota's account. Contrary to his account, she had posted many pictures that were organized in an aesthetic array. The most recent one was of herself surrounded by colorful balloons against a white backdrop. Darren recognized it: the caption had wished herself a happy belated birthday, and there had been hundreds of comments wishing Dakota the same.

I wasn't what he was looking for, though. He scrolled on, past the birthday picture, past a portrait of Dom, past some street photography. He noticed how good the pictures she took were, almost as professional as the one taken of her maybe-mother although in a style that was brighter and more cheerful. However, he didn't have the time to admire them, and instead, he searched for another picture of her. When he found a suitable portrait, he enlarged it on his phone screen and laid his phone against his laptop screen, next to Rebecca Kingsley's face.

Darren's jaw dropped. Only next to each other it became clear to him how similar they were. Not just their eyes, skin color and hair color were alike, their brows had the same shape and were noticeably darker than their hair. Rebecca Kingsley's lips were thinner, but Darren knew that happened with age. Her hair was also slightly darker, but he attributed the difference to the influence of Dakota's father's genetics on her phenotype.

Darren also noticed Rebecca Kingsley's nose was thinner and that she had a birthmark under her right eye, but the few differences he found got lost in the many similarities. The face shape of the two women and how their faces got narrower closer to the jaw, their eye shape and the long lashes, touched up lightly with mascara, the light tint of their lips...

Darren sat back in his chair, looking at the two women from a distance, when his eyes caught the caption of Rebecca's picture. "I'm proud to introduce you to Rebecca Kingsley, the new editor at Metropolis Entertainment!" Darren laughed at the amount of emojis following that statement, after which it continued with, "So proud that I even treated myself to a new LinkedIn profile picture. What do you think?"

Her friends left a bunch of excited comments, congratulating her. "Gorgeous woman!" "You look like a model!" with a heart emoji. Seeing that Rebecca had replied to the latter comment, Darren opened up the comment thread and read, "I got a spray tan, can you tell?" To which her friend had replied, "Spray tan? You live in Florida, you don't need spray tan!"

Darren continued to read, seeing Rebecca reply with many laughing emojis, before he realized the significance of the comment. Rebecca lived in Florida. He hadn't even thought about looking up her address to see if she came from here, but this was supporting evidence for the hypothesis that this Rebecca was Dakota's mother.

He looked back at Dakota's picture again that was still open on his phone. Saturday morning, she'd told him she didn't want to look for her parents. How would she react to the profile of what potentially could be her mother? And the next question Darren thought about was whether he should even show it to her. But what else was he supposed to do?

He bit his lip, closed his laptop and turned off his phone, after which he got up to walk to the living room and join the McCosta family. However, as he continued his evening in their company, he couldn't shake Dakota and her mother off his mind.

Another Tuesday, another update! What do you think, is Darren right to look for Dakota's parents? Or should he just to stay out of it?

Love, Jessy