She shrugs. “They told me you had died but they wouldn’t show me the body. Then my parents came in and my mom told me not to worry and how sorry she was about everything. No one would answer any of my questions. I even called the police but the doctor and my parents talked to them and I was underage, and somehow this whole thing got swept under the table. They told them that I was just upset about the stillbirth.”

“Oh my God,” I whisper.

“I tried to look for you but my parents were this vault. I couldn’t get anything out of them. Stillbirths don’t really get funerals, at least my parents refused to put one together. They just forced me to go back home with them and never talk about it again.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Briefly.” She nods. “I was so exhausted from the birth both mentally and physically, and then I was so overwhelmed by everything that happened afterward. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what happened to you. I didn’t want to believe that you had died but I had no proof. I felt like I was going crazy.”

I shake my head again, trying to internalize everything that she’s saying.

“I came back to California about three months later. I ran away again, only this time I took all of my money and I stayed quiet until I turned eighteen. Then there was nothing they could do to bring me back.”

“So…how did you find out about me?” I ask.

“I started school. I got a job at a library. I tried to move on with my life but I couldn’t let it go. I ended up hiring a private investigator but after months of looking, he didn’t find a thing. What he did confirm, however, was that you were never a stillbirth and that was something, at least.”

She gets up from her seat and walks around the room, looking at the pictures on the wall. There’s a vase full of daisies that she adjusts slightly by moving a few stems around.

“When my mom got sick, she passed really quickly,” Josephine says. “And a few days before, I was with her and she was on a lot of medication and I just asked about you. She apologized and said you never died. That my father had arranged for you to be adopted by some family up north. They weren’t wealthy so they were very much ‘motivated by money’ - his words. And as long as the money continued to come, they’d never tell you the truth.”

I put my head in between my legs and take a few deep breaths. My heart feels like it’s beating out of my chest.

“Are you okay?” Josephine rushes over to me.