I called the number on the card from my hotel that night. He answered on the second ring. I said the woman’s name, and there was a long silence. Then he asked me what my mother’s name was. When I told him, he said, “Then you need to hear this from me before you hear it from anyone else.” He told me the woman who died in 1968 had been my mother’s older sister — a sister nobody in my family had ever mentioned.
I thought he was mistaken. My mother had always told me she was an only child. He said she wasn’t. He had known my mother when she was seventeen, and he’d been there the night her sister died. There had been an accident, and my mother had been the only person who knew what actually happened. But there was something else. He said the woman had left behind a baby, and that baby had disappeared from every record within a week. I asked where the baby went, and he said, “Your mother took her home. But she didn’t take her as her sister’s child.”
Then he told me the name that had been written on the original hospital record. It wasn’t my mother’s name. It wasn’t even a name I’d ever heard in our family. It was mine. He said my mother had spent fifty-six years making sure nobody discovered that I wasn’t her daughter in the way I’d always believed. The man on the plane had been looking for me because the woman who died in 1968 had left one final instruction: “When she turns fifty-eight, tell her why her mother chose her — and tell her what happened to the child who was supposed to go home with her.”
