Isabel had been stopping by my dad’s every couple days, which at first irritated my father, and understandably so. To him, her presence was a suggestion that he couldn’t take care of his baby boy, which he had done magnificently for twenty-seven years. After three bites of Isabel’s famous enchiladas and my dad waking to find his house spotless, my father changed his tune and was now her staunchest supporter.

I open the fridge and grab one of Isabel’s legendary Reuben sandwiches — thinly sliced pastrami, extra sauerkraut, extra mustard, on toasted rye — then head to the kitchen table and flip open my laptop.

I eat half the sandwich and check my stocks. Everything looks good and I keep all my algorithms in place. I spend the next five minutes watching the first episode of season three of Game of Thrones and devouring the second half of the sandwich.

At 3:17 a.m., I open up my email and find the thread from AST, Advanced Surveillance and Tracking.

The last email I received from AST was the past October. It was an invoice from the company owner, Mike Lang, who for the previous three years I had been paying to locate my mother.

Which he did.

Except, the woman he thought was my mother wasn’t actually her.

I never told Mike what actually happened: that even though the Jane Doe who was pulled from the Potomac River had matched my mother’s fingerprints, it was all an elaborate ruse by President Sullivan to smoke out the location of CIA black sites operating illegally here in the United States.

However, it isn’t my mother I’m contacting Mike about.

It’s my father.

I couldn’t help but wonder where my dad was when my mother was professedly experimenting on me as an infant. What was he doing? Did he have his head buried so deep in the sand that he failed to realize my mother was using me as her own personal guinea pig? How could he not have known?

Plus, I was having trouble believing his long-standing narrative of how he and my mother brought me home from the hospital the day I was born, then realized something was wrong with me the next day when I was only awake for a single hour. This implied I was born with my condition which, according to both John LeHigh, the ex-Director of the CIA, and my mother, wasn’t the case.

Something didn’t add up.

I hit reply and type:

Hey Mike,

I have a project for you if you have time. I’m putting together a scrapbook for my dad and I don’t want him to know. I was wondering if you could dig up his birth certificate for me. And mine while you’re at it (I can’t find it anywhere.) And if you find anything on my grandparents, could you send that along as well?