…your half-sister. And we believe your mother is still alive.”
The old photograph had been mailed anonymously to the police department twenty-five years ago, a few months after my mother, Diane, disappeared. There was no return address. The detective, Frank Moreno, had kept it in her file ever since, unable to identify the room or the baby.
Now he could.
With a warrant, police searched my stepfather’s house the next day. The basement room was empty, but the walls held marks where pictures had hung. In a hidden drawer under the bed, officers found a hospital bracelet that read “Baby Girl Lowe” and a stack of letters from my mother, addressed to me. My stepfather had never sent them.
The letters explained everything. My mother had become pregnant at forty-two. My stepfather, Richard, was furious, controlling and sometimes violent. He kept her in the basement room for the last months of the pregnancy, telling everyone she’d left. After the baby was born, my mother escaped one night and went to a women’s shelter. Richard kept the baby and gave her to his sister to raise.
My mother had mailed the photo to the police as proof. She’d written to me for years. None of the letters ever reached me.
Frank found her through the shelter’s old records. She was sixty-seven, living in Maine under a different name. She’d been too afraid of Richard to come back.
My half-sister, Anna, was twenty-five. She’d been raised by Richard’s sister and told her mother had died. When she learned the truth, she asked to meet us both.
Richard was arrested and charged with kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment. My mother, Anna and I met for the first time together in a coffee shop in Portland. My mother held both our hands across the table and wouldn’t let go. “I never stopped writing to you,” she said. Now she doesn’t have to.
