“I’ve been visiting your grave in Savannah every year on your birthday,” the woman across from me sobbed. She was wiping her eyes with a coarse paper napkin.

Her hands were shaking so hard she spilled her sweet tea across the laminated table.

I just sat there.

The noise of the Cracker Barrel was buzzing around us. Clattering plates. People laughing. But my brain had completely stopped working.

For thirty-eight years, I believed a lie.

I believed my biological parents were dead.

My adoptive mother, Helen, had told me they died in a terrible car accident. She told me she took me in because she wanted to save me from foster care.

I grew up feeling so incredibly grateful to her.

But now, this woman named Gloria was sitting right in front of me. She had the exact same nose as me. She had the same small gap between her front teeth.

And she was very much alive.

I need to back up for a second so this makes sense.

I grew up in Brunswick, Georgia. It was a quiet childhood, mostly. Helen worked as a head nurse at the local community hospital. She was always tired, always smelling like lavender soap and clinical alcohol.

She was a single mother. She never married, telling me that I was the only love she ever needed in her life.

Every year on my birthday, Helen would bake a red velvet cake. She would slide a light blue envelope across the kitchen table. Inside was always a card, and she always signed it with the exact same message.

“To my miracle girl, love always, Mom.”

The signature was written in a very distinct, looping blue cursive.

The “M” in Mom had this little extra curl at the top. I saw that handwriting on permission slips, on lunch notes, on my college application papers.

I loved those blue cards. I kept all thirty-eight of them in a shoebox under my bed. They were my proof that I was wanted.

We didn’t have much money when I was younger. Helen worked double shifts at the hospital to keep us afloat. I remember she used to clip coupons from the Sunday paper, sitting at the kitchen table with her reading glasses slid down her nose.

She made so many sacrifices for me. Or, at least, that is what she always wanted me to believe.