His mom, ever the free spirit, didn’t understand why he got upset. “It’s not like we were lying to you,” his mom said, shaking her head, sending her long brown hair into violent waves. “We planned to tell you, but we wanted to wait until you were older, until you could understand.”

“Yeah,” his dad had added, nodding eagerly.

“So you waited until I was almost thirty?” Marty asked, incredulous.

“Of course not, but as you got older, you were such a moody teenager…” His mom trailed off and laughed. “What does it matter? What does it change? I’m still your mother, aren’t I?”

It changed everything, of course, but Marty couldn’t find the words for it. It felt like he’d been the butt of a thirty-year joke.

Had everyone known that he was adopted? Did they laugh about it behind his back?

His parents had hidden it from him for so long that it stood to reason they could’ve lied to him about everything else in his life. He’d believe anything, apparently. It seemed impossible for Marty to ever trust again.

“She was a very sad girl, nice, but very sad,” his mom explained. “She didn’t want to let you go. She lived with us for the last three months of her pregnancy, and a week after we adopted you, she disappeared.”

It made no sense to him. The records surrounding his adoption were sealed, with no option to open them. His parents had a single picture of her, his birth mom, the one who went by Rebecca.

It was a fluke he’d even managed to find her. Marty debated for weeks whether it might be worth it to sign up for an ancestry website. The most popular one, with the most possible matches, had recently had a data breach. Thousands of people’s information was hacked, and Marty would normally want nothing to do with a company like that.

Yet...the temptation of finding his birth mother was too great. He sent his DNA in and got a match. With the FBI chasing him down, though, he didn’t have time to wait to see if she was interested in meeting. He took advantage of the ancestry website’s security weakness, which had been fixed poorly, and got her name and address for himself. It was a bit of light hacking, but for a good cause – he was able to find out that his birth mother was now going by the name Claire.

From what he could see online, her life had been an interesting one. Despite giving him away, she’d had three daughters – none of whom she gave away – and recently bought an expensive hotel on the island.