The investigator read me the name, and I knew it immediately. It was a woman who had worked at the pharmacy near my house for years, the same pharmacy where my son had picked up my prescriptions when I couldn’t drive. I asked why she would have my card and my ID, and he said they still didn’t know how she got them, but there was something else in the file. She had listed my son as her emergency contact on two different hospital visits. I called my son that night and asked him if he knew her. He said no. I asked him why the hospital had his number. He went quiet and said, “Mom, I think you need to come over.”
He had a folder on his kitchen table. Inside were copies of text messages between him and the woman, going back almost two years. He said he’d met her through a friend and had been helping her because she was sick, but he’d never told me because he knew I’d ask questions. I asked whether he had ever picked her up from that hospital in March 2022. He said yes. I asked why. He said she’d called him because she had nowhere to go. Then he showed me the photograph she’d sent him that night. It was taken in the hospital bathroom, and she was holding my driver’s license beside her face. I asked why she had it. He said he didn’t know. But underneath the photograph was a message he’d never answered: “She still doesn’t know, does she?”
I asked him what that meant. He said he’d been hoping I’d never find out because the woman had told him something about our family that he didn’t believe. I asked what she claimed. He said she’d told him she wasn’t stealing my identity for money. She’d been using my name because she believed she was my daughter. I laughed because I have one son and one daughter, and my daughter died as an infant. Then my son opened the last page of the investigator’s report. The pharmacy record had matched the woman’s identity to a birth record from our county. The mother listed on it was me. The date was forty-three years ago. And the baby I had always been told died at the hospital was recorded as having been discharged alive.
