“There was never an agency,” he said gently. “That’s what they never told you. Your parents didn’t place your son through a closed adoption. They placed him privately, directly, with a couple they’d found themselves — the Danvers. Good people. They raised him in the next county over. Forty minutes from your parents’ house.” He swallowed. “There was no sealed agency record for you to find, because there was no agency. The trail went cold because your parents made sure there was no trail — and then watched you search for thirty-one years and said nothing.”
Forty minutes. My whole life I’d pictured my son on the other side of the country, the other side of the world. He’d been forty minutes away.
“How do you know all this?” I asked, though some part of me had already understood, the way you understand a thing your heart reaches before your mind does.
