I gave birth at 3:47 AM on Thursday. It was fast once we got there. The doctors were strangers. The nurses were strangers. Everything was cold and bright and wrong.

I heard her cry. One cry. Not even a full cry. More like a hiccup.

Then they picked her up and carried her out of the room.

“Wait. Can I hold her? Can I see her?”

Nobody answered. My mother was standing by the door. She had her purse on her arm. I remember that detail because it was so strange. Who stands in a delivery room with their purse on their arm like they’re about to walk out of a Walgreens?

“Mama. Where is she? Where’s my baby?”

“It’s handled, Tamika. You are sixteen years old. You cannot raise a child. I did what was best for everybody.”

I didn’t understand until the next morning. A nurse came in. She was the only one who’d make eye contact. She sat on the edge of the bed and told me.

My mother had made an arrangement with a couple named Caldwell. They were wealthy. They wanted a baby. My mother had agreed to let them adopt my daughter in exchange for $50,000. The papers were already signed. My mother had signed them using a power of attorney I didn’t know existed. My baby was already gone.

I started screaming. They sedated me. I don’t remember Tuesday or Wednesday.

I went home. I sat in my room. I didn’t speak to my mother for six weeks. She acted like nothing had happened. She bought new curtains. She went to church. She told people at First Baptist that I’d had “a medical procedure” and was recovering.

At seventeen, I packed a backpack. I took the $340 I’d saved from babysitting and I got on a Greyhound.

I didn’t tell her I was leaving. I left a note on the kitchen table. It said: “You sold my baby.”

I didn’t go back. Not for twenty years.

I bounced around. Montgomery. Tuscaloosa. Eventually Birmingham. I got my GED. I worked at a Popeyes, then a daycare, then a doctor’s office as a receptionist. I built something. Not much, but mine.