Sully paused midstep and followed her, delighted that she’d noticed it.

“Isn’t it beautiful? Elliot Graham painted it for me.”

Lovey was standing in front of it now, still staring. Her voice was shaking when she finally spoke. “What is this?”

“It’s a painting of my birth mother and me. I didn’t know I was adopted until my mother passed a few months back, and I’ve been looking for my birth mother ever since. That’s why I wound up here. The last known address that was found for her was Blessings, Georgia. I bugged everybody I met, asking if they knew her, but it wound up a dead end. Someone told me Elliot Graham was something of a psychic, and I wasn’t going to miss a chance that he might help. So I went to see him.”

Lovey shook her head. “I didn’t know that’s why you were here. I don’t hear so good anymore.”

“Yes, I’ve gone to every possible place here in Blessings looking for records that would say she’d been here.”

Lovey was beginning to shake. “But this painting? If you don’t know who she is, how did you get this?”

Sully pointed at the painting. “See that necklace? I have it. It was in with the adoption papers I found, along with a letter my birth mother left. So I took the letter with me to Elliot’s house. He held it, and then all he would say was to stay in Blessings. So I stayed. He only gave the painting to me a couple of days ago. He said he saw this in a vision when he held the letter and painted it for me. Isn’t she beautiful? Her name is Janie.”

Lovey swayed and would have fallen had Sully not caught her.

Melissa came running. “Honey, what’s wrong? Are you sick? Come sit down.”

Lovey curled her fingers around Sully’s wrist.

“Your name…all of it,” she asked.

Sully frowned. “John Sullivan Raines, but she called—”

Lovey’s voice was shaking, and she couldn’t look away from his face.

“Oh my God!” she cried, and then grabbed his arm. “She called you Johnny. You were born in Columbus, Missouri, on June 4, 1974, to a sixteen-year-old girl named Loretta Jane Chapman.”

Sully’s heart began to pound. “How do you know that?”

“Because I’m that girl. My last husband called me Lovey, and that’s all anyone in Blessings ever knew. The girl in the painting… I had that blouse, and your father gave me that necklace.”

Sully looked down at the woman in his arms. His eyes were full of tears, but he couldn’t stop smiling.

“Oh my God, indeed. Hello, Janie Chapman. I’ve been looking for you,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her.

Lovey was laughing and crying, and Melissa was ecstatic for both of them.

“Both of you, come sit,” she said.

And so they did, still holding hands, still staring at each other in total shock.

“You have no idea what just happened to me,” Sully said. “All my life, I questioned my parents about why I didn’t look like either of them. Why my hair was black and they both had light hair. Why my eyes were dark. Why they were so fair and freckled in the summers and why I tanned so easily. They laughed it off. All of it, telling me it was recessive genes, or that I looked like their long-dead relatives…and I bought it. Right up to the moment I found that birth certificate. Finding you gave credence to my existence.”