“Mom, my bio parents, Betsy and Johnny, they were found to be innocent of murder. It was self-defense. They lost me for all these years, and they clearly wanted me back. I understand why you didn’t want to hand me over as a child, but when I was eighteen, or a young adult, you could have told me. When I read that article about them, what struck me was how desperately they wanted to find me. That’s why they did the interviews, the talk show. The DNA test. To find me.”

My mother hiccupped and sobbed again.

“They weren’t bad people, Mom. They did not willingly give me up.”

I did not have children, so I could not fully understand the heartache a parent would feel for a child who was gone. But I could imagine part of it. My bio parents had lived for decades without their own child. Their own daughter.

I had had enough. “That wasn’t right, Mom. If not for me, then for them. They were teenagers when all this happened. They went to prison. You should have told me so I could have made my own decision. My decision would have been to find them, knowing their story. I’m thirty-seven years old. They have not known for decades if I was alive or dead, healthy or sick, happy or not. Wouldn’t you want to know if it were your daughter? If it were me or Jules?”

“Yes. Yes, I would have wanted to know.” My mother was trembling and her sisters had their arms around her. They were three white-haired women in their seventies, and they were all crushed. I could see that. I was crushed, too. I was crushed for them and for me and for Betsy and Johnny. “Aunt Camellia and Aunt Iris. Wouldn’t you want to know your niece? I’m sure my aunt Tilly would like to know me.”

“Yes,” they said, their voices weak. “Yes, we would.”

“One more question,” I said.

“Anything,” my mother said.

“Did you know that Johnny and Betsy named me Rose?”

“No, we didn’t. Not until their trial ten years after we adopted you.”

I have loved roses all my life. They calm me down. I had them painted or embroidered on my clothes. In vases at my table. My pink and yellow rose wallpaper at home and in the bookstore. Surrounding my home. Growing up my trellis. I thought it was because my mother and aunts and grandma loved roses. It was deeper than that.