I pressed enter and the list that ensued was enormous. Of course—“beautiful flower” is a common name for girls. There was a jewellery store chain in Sarawak, Malaysia. I saw a few LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. I clicked on all of them, even when the last names didn’t match. None was Mother. They were young people working as lawyers, architects, teachers, doctors, property managers, hotel managers, and owners of restaurants and corporations. I also read some obituaries, but they were for other Swee Huas, who lived, loved, and left those who cherished them behind.

I spent hours on the internet and read dozens of pages of search results, only to confirm my mother’s name was not rare. And perhaps what Auntie Miriam had said to me all those years ago was still true. She did not want to be found.

When Leo started fussing, waking from her nap, I closed my laptop. As I was pulling the baby out of the carrier to feed her, John came home. He looked particularly dapper, with a sharp pink tie and his hair blown slightly to the side by the wind. Next to him, I felt frumpy in my nursing top splattered with spit-up. I realized this was the first time in a long while that I had paused to really look at him, not in passing on my way to tend to the baby, or with eyelids tugging at me to sleep.

“How was your day?” John asked.

“Okay,” I replied.

“Just okay?”

I looked at John’s familiar, caring face and resolved to tell him what had been consuming me the last few weeks. “I’ve decided to look for my mother.”

“I see.” John said and sat down across from me.

“Ever since Leo was born, I can’t stop thinking about her. I feel her everywhere, like she’s following me, or haunting me.”

“You never really talk about your mom. I feel like I don’t know much about her.”

“Sometimes I feel that way, too. For a long time, I just suppressed all my questions and emotions because I couldn’t do anything about them. My dad, Auntie Choo Neo, and Bea never wanted to talk about her. They still don’t.”

“I can understand wanting to know. To be honest, I’m surprised this didn’t came up sooner. Every time I tried to ask you about her, you changed the subject or just ignored me. At first, I thought you were hiding your family from me. That you weren’t serious about me,” John recalled playfully.

I tugged at his arm, pulling him closer to me. “You’re right. I was afraid of what you’d think of them,” I confessed. “Do you remember when I first met your baba? That’s when I knew you could handle my family.”

“Ah yes, the epic shopping trip with Baba.”

“I think we’d been dating for around six months. You told me we had to run some errands for your baba before we hit the movie theatre, because she couldn’t drive. What I didn’t realize was that you weren’t just doing the errands for her, you were taking her on those errands.” I wagged my finger at John.