I read the mother’s name on the relinquishment form three times because I knew it. It belonged to a woman my husband had always described as an old coworker who moved away in the nineties. The form was dated March 1994, the same month as the cassette. I called the number listed on the agency paperwork, but it had been disconnected for years. So I searched the woman’s name instead. She had died in 2018, but I found an obituary with one surviving daughter. That daughter lived less than an hour from where my husband worked.
The next morning I played the cassette again. This time I listened past the part where the woman asked him to call her back. There was a second message after a long stretch of silence. Her voice was quieter, and she said, “I can’t keep explaining this to people. You promised me she’d have a home.” Then my father-in-law’s voice came on from somewhere in the background. He wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to my husband. “You tell your mother nothing until it’s done. She’ll never forgive you if she knows.” I stopped the tape there and looked at the relinquishment form again. My husband had signed it as the witness.
Then I found the page I’d been looking for. The agency had attached a placement record showing where the baby went after the relinquishment. The adoptive parents’ names were blacked out, but the emergency contact hadn’t been redacted. It was my father-in-law. I called the state records office and asked whether that contact information had ever been updated. The woman said yes — once, in 1998. The new emergency contact was my husband. I sat at the kitchen table until he came home, put the cassette and the paperwork in front of him, and asked one question: “Who was the baby?” He didn’t ask what I meant. He just looked at the date and said, “I was hoping you’d never find that tape.”
