And then, he told me, he had done exactly what I had done. He searched. From the other side of the same wall. He requested records that didn’t exist, wrote to agencies that had never heard of him, hit the same dead ends I did — because my parents had built the wall carefully, from both sides.
“I’d almost given up,” he said. “Then a woman came into my ER with the same name I’d been writing on every records request for a decade. I told myself it was a coincidence. There are other women with that name.” He managed a small, wrecked smile. “Then I operated on you. And afterward I looked at your intake form — your mother’s maiden name, your birthplace. And I knew. I’ve known since the moment I closed the incision that I was standing over my own mother.”
We had been searching for each other the entire time.
