“Yes, I’m fine,” I say looking up at her. “I just got a bit…overwhelmed.”

“My mom had a picture of you that one of the intermediaries involved with this so-called adoption had sent her,” Josephine says after a moment. “You were five and you look exactly like you do now. Grown up, of course, but you’re a carbon copy of that little girl.”

She pulls the picture out of the top drawer of the dresser. It’s inside a book of Emily Dickinson poems.

I look at it. I’ve never seen it before but I’m dressed in my favorite green dress and I’m smiling from ear to ear.

“I knew who you were the minute you walked into the house,” Josephine admits. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes. And when I saw the results of that DNA test… I don’t know why I needed to see them after all of this time but I guess it had something to do with all of the lies that I’ve been fed by my family.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” she says, hugging me and pulling me close to her. “I’m the one who is sorry. I am so sorry that I wasn’t there for you all of these years.”

We sob in each other’s arms for a long time.

After I dry my tears, something occurs to me.

“Why didn’t you find me after you learned that I wasn’t dead?” I ask.

15

Olive

When I don’t hear from her…

At first, the silence is deafening. She sits back in her chair and crosses her legs. I sit back as well and brace myself for the answer.

If she found out about me when I was five, why didn’t she try to find me again?

What could’ve stopped her from looking for me?

“I only found out about you a year ago,” Josephine says, the pupils in her almond eyes dilating.

“What?” I gasp.

“My mother held onto that picture all of those years but she never showed it to me. I had no idea who you lived with. I didn’t even know your name.”

I cover my mouth with my hand and shake my head.

I try to imagine how painful this must have been for her, but all I can think of is my own pain.

My heart tightens and pounds so loudly that I think it’s going to burst out of my chest.

“I hired another private investigator to try to find you but I didn’t know much. I didn’t know your name or where you lived. My father refused to talk about any of it. He still insists that you were a stillborn. All the PI had was this picture and it wasn’t much.”

We hold each other for a while after that.