My 'Cousin' Was My Sister All Along

Priya and I were raised as cousins and treated as twins. Our mothers are sisters; we were born eleven months apart; we shared bedrooms on every family holiday and finished each other's sentences before we could properly talk. 'Closer than cousins,' the aunties always said, indulgently. Turns out the aunties undersold it.

We did the DNA tests together, as a laugh, on a girls' weekend in our thirties — matching kits, a bottle of wine, expecting to confirm our cousinhood with a number. The site processed hers a day before mine. When mine landed and we opened the relatives tab side by side on the sofa, there she was at the very top of my list, and there I was at the top of hers, under a label neither of us could immediately parse because it made no sense: Sister. Full sibling. Shared DNA in the range that has exactly one meaning.

We sat with the wine going warm, doing the maths that wouldn't math, until the only shape that fit arrived: same mother, same father. My mother. Priya's father. Which meant the woman I called Auntie — Priya's mum, my mother's sister — had raised, as her own, her sister's child by her own husband.