HURST, Texas — DNA test kits, and the ancestry they reveal, continue to connect people with their ancestry and, tens of thousands of times over, disconnect people from the stories of who they thought they were.
Count Stephanie Meyer among the latter.
"I always felt like an oddball. I felt different," she told me from her home in Hurst, Texas. "I just thought I was a little bit weird."
Memories of that weird childhood, with an awkward mix of good memories and bad, were upended as she neared her 44th birthday.
"The day before I was going to send that test in, in a conversation with my Mom, she told me my results might be...surprising."
Ancestry DNA proved her mom right. Her dad was not her biological dad. Someone else was.
"I was definitely in shock and not ready to really process that," she said of the 2019 discovery. "That's when my brain completely fell to pieces. I was really having a mental breakdown over all of it. I broke. And maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm extra fragile. But...it completely undid me."
250 miles away in Cypress, Texas on the northwest side of Houston, Paulette Bethel's world was coming undone too.
"Oh my God. My world crumbled," she said. "It took about 90 seconds for my world as I knew it to blow up."
Bethel knew she was from a multicultural family. The artwork in her home celebrates that fact. But a DNA test kit at age 66 proved half of her life had also been a lie.
"It absolutely for me, blew up my sense of who I thought I was. For months, I cried nonstop. I cried, I cried, I cried," she told me. "I had a story. This changed my story."
Both women were now in a club they didn't really care to join. DNA - NPE is what science calls them: NPE for Not Parent Expected.
Paulette Bethel discovered that the dad who raised her was not her biological dad.
"Boy, do I understand the devastation right? Because I was still devastated," Bethel said. "This is not just grief. This is trauma. This is identity trauma."
Paulette says that when she Googled this phrase "Surely, I cannot be the only person that's going through this" she found previous WFAA stories on the DNA discovery crisis. And she found the NPE Network - a support group in Texas now with more than 16,000 members: people with stories just like hers.
Bethel did find a new extended family. They have accepted her but she says they want their privacy respected, so they are not being identified in this story. And Paulette's parents are deceased. There are answers she will never get from her Mom.
"I would really just like to know her story, not to judge her," Bethel said. "Because in this life, I won't know."
There is a happier connection, however, back in Hurst. Through contacts in the Ancestry DNA site, Stephanie Meyer found a man named Jim Parsons in Arizona: her biological Dad.
"You look fantastic," Parsons said to her on a FaceTime call.
"Did it take long to put two and two together," I asked him about being contacted about Stephanie.
"Oh no not for me," he said with a smile.
During an 8-month period when Stephanie's parents were separated, Parsons had a brief relationship with Stephanie's mom. But he was never told and never knew that the daughter born in 1975 might be his. Stephanie's mom and husband at the time kept that secret to themselves.
"And in 1975 when I was born, I think that was an honorable noble choice," she said.
"It felt divine. It felt like a blessing," Parsons said of the day he found out about Stephanie. A blessing that has brought Stephanie a new family and new siblings who have welcomed her with open arms. The families have even gone on vacation cruises together.
"I always wanted a daughter. I got one. And the one I got, feels like she was custom-made. And I couldn't be happier," Parsons said.
"Even though it was really hard to discover, I would not pack Pandora's Box back up," Stephanie Meyer said. "I'm glad that it was opened."
And even though the Pandora's Box opened in Cypress, Texas has not been as kind with answers for Paulette, she is also a trained trauma counselor and coach. She is now helping others get through the often painful journey of making these difficult DNA discoveries.
"Early in the journey it was reconciling that I'm not who I thought I was," Bethel said. "When you were asking if I'm OK? My life finally makes sense in ways that it didn't before."
A sense of self, slowly being pieced back together.
"The fact that I am having this conversation with you without needing a box of tissues is one piece of evidence that I've come pretty far," Meyer said. "I'm just really thankful. I make a lot more sense, now that I really know who I am."
And in an era of unexpected DNA surprises, that's all any NPE really wants to know.