Some twenty-one years ago my little sister placed her baby for adoption. It was the most heartrending, courageous and difficult decision she had ever made, and we all wept with her when she handed her baby girl to an anonymous, yet hand-chosen family. Then…two years ago, I received a Facebook friend request from a young girl with the same birthday as my adopted niece. It was too much to hope for, almost too miraculous to believe. But it was true: My sister’s daughter, my niece, found us on Facebook.

Our family had often talked about my niece, using the name my sister had given her. We remembered her whenever we saw a girl who would be her age at that time. Everytime my parents moved into a new house, they planted a tree for her and we all prayed for her happiness and safety. We knew nothing about her—all those years we didn’t know where she lived or with whom. Although we knew that legally she could find us when she turned twenty-one, there was no way for us to find her. And then finally, all those years of unknowing and all those years of wondering culminated in a reunion that most dream about.

My sister’s story was the inspiration for this novel, And Then I Found You. It is my way of exploring the way we live with unknowing. We want certainty, We want solid ground under our feet. We want to be sure of our place in the world, and yet we rarely, if ever, have that certainty. So then, how do we live? And what happens when the lost become found?

Although the personal facts are left for my sister to tell, the fictional story in And Then I Found You explores the emotions and extraordinary change that reunions bring to a life and to a family.

I hope this story touches your heart.

Warmly,

Patti Callahan Henry

prologue

BLUFFTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

1988

March twentieth was full of First Things, and to thirteen-year-old Katie Vaughn it was the day that started all the other days in her life, the beginning of everything that might come after.

It was midday, recess, when Katie hung upside down on the monkey bars. A net of freckles covered her pale face and her copper hair dipped into a puddle—a disgusting soup made of mud and the lime-green slime of newly mowed grass. But it didn’t bother Katie. She knew how to hang upside down, swing up to grab the bar, and do a full loop before landing five feet out from the bars on the solid earth below her feet. Katie was showing off and she knew she was, but if you know how to do something better than anyone else, Mom had told her, you should be doing it.