Then one morning a pain doubled me over at work. Emergency surgery. And the next afternoon, the surgeon who’d saved my life leaned over my chart, and a silver cross slipped from his collar.
My grandmother’s cross.
“Where did you get that?” I whispered. “I put that in my son’s blanket the day he was born.”
He went very still. Then he looked at me.
“Did they ever tell you what really happened to him?”
Chapter 2: What Really Happened
I couldn’t speak. I just stared at the cross, and at his face, really looking now — the shape of his jaw, something around the eyes that I had spent thirty-one years trying not to imagine.
“No,” I finally managed. “They told me it was a closed adoption. An agency. That they never knew where he went.” My voice broke. “I searched. For three decades. There was never a record anywhere.”
The surgeon pulled a chair to my bedside and sat, like a man who had rehearsed this and still wasn’t ready.
