I’m sorry we never told you. This belonged to your birth mother. She left it for you.

The rest of the day was a blur, and the ensuing days up to the funeral weren’t any better. He kept replaying vignettes from his past, remembering the times he’d asked his parents why his hair was black and straight when they were both blonds. And how did he get so tall when they were both short? They’d always laughed it off, blaming ancestors or recessive genes, and he’d bought it.

He was still going through the house, moving things he wanted to keep into a storage unit and getting the rest ready for the upcoming estate auction. In the evenings, he would go through photo albums, remembering the events and seeing anew the marked differences of his appearance within the family.

Some pictures were taken at parties, like the one he had at the skating rink for his thirteenth birthday. He grinned at the clothes they were wearing and started eyeing the faces to see if he could remember all the names. One photo stood out from the others because it was him holding hands with a girl out on the floor of the skating rink. They both smiled and waved at the camera as they skated past his dad, who was the family photographer. Her name was Missy, and she was the first girl he kissed. He’d had the biggest crush on her most of that year, but then her family had moved away. When school started that fall, she was gone, and life moved on.

After that trip down memory lane, Sully put the albums up.

The evidence of his adoption was impossible to ignore, and the differences in appearance between him and his family finally made sense. Even though his parents had been wonderful and loving, this lie was huge, and he didn’t know how to get past it.

The adoption papers stated he was the baby of a teenage girl named Janie Chapman. He found out later that his parents knew her because she had lived on their street. Although she’d signed the adoption papers the day he was born, the accompanying letter he found stated that she actually lived with Joe and Dolly Raines for the first six months of his life, nursing him, caring for him in their house while they worked, and then one morning she was gone.

Sully couldn’t get her out of his head. She’d carried him in her belly for nine months, nursed him for the first six months of his life, then disappeared without an explanation? He needed to know why, and the few details he had were what was on his original birth certificate.

He had her name, and where and when he was born. Boone County Hospital in Columbia, Missouri, on June 4, 1974.

Since that was all he had to go on, he chose one of the ancestry sites and took a DNA test. After the results arrived, he hired a genetic researcher named Marilyn Bedford to see if he had any blood relatives registered in the system.