Jennifer had warned Jess not to look for her birth father, but the urge to fill the void that had followed her since childhood propelled Jess on. She couldn't have known the scale of the fallout her search would cause...

When it came to her birth father, Jess had several leads.

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She had been told that her birth mother was in a relationship in 1987 with a man with an unusual surname. And Jess's DNA test suggested she might have “Germanic” genes.

She found the five adult children of the man with the unusual surname on Facebook. They all seemed to live in the same town as their father - in the town where Jennifer grew up and now lived. Jess messaged them. She was deliberately vague about what she was looking for, suggesting she was researching her ancestry.

Only Adam, the eldest, replied.

“He put two and two together,” Jess says now. “Then went: ‘Are you actually looking for your father?’”

Adam, it turned out, was also into family history, but had done his DNA test with a different company from the one Jess had used to find her birth mother’s family.

So once again she found herself spitting into a vial and sending the sample off to a laboratory, anxiously waiting for the result to come back. When it did, it confirmed that Adam was her half-brother and that they shared a father, Louis.

Adam told his father - and in the middle of August 2022 Jess texted him. “Hi, it’s Jess, bit of a crazy day all round,” she wrote. “I’m sure it’s come as a shock to you.”

According to Jess, he replied: “It’s knocked me sideways. I just dunno what to say at the moment. I’m sure you understand, but it’s so nice to hear from you.”

Louis had been with his long-term partner Debbie, with whom he has five children, since they were teenagers. When he told her he wanted to talk to her about something but didn’t want the neighbours to hear, she was immediately suspicious. He suggested they drive to a pub in the countryside, where he told her about Jess. Debbie asked him how old she was and realised Jess was almost exactly the same age as their second child.

“I did feel like smashing a glass over his head,” Debbie says now. She described Jess's arrival as being like a grenade going off in the family.