We agreed to meet the very next day. We picked a Cracker Barrel off I-95, halfway between Brunswick and Savannah.

I got there thirty minutes early. I sat in my Buick in the parking lot, my hands shaking on the steering wheel.

I kept looking in the rearview mirror, wondering if I was making the biggest mistake of my life.

I almost started the engine to drive away. I really did. I think part of me already knew that whatever happened inside that restaurant was going to change everything.

But I went inside anyway.

I saw her immediately. She was sitting in a corner booth, staring at the entrance.

She looked so much like me it was terrifying. She had the same curly brown hair, the same sloped shoulders.

When I walked over to the table, she stood up. She didn’t say a word. She just grabbed my hands, and she started sobbing.

“They told me you died during delivery,” Gloria whispered, her voice cracking.

She explained that she was only seventeen when she got pregnant. Her family had sent her to the hospital in Brunswick to have the baby in secret.

She told me she was drugged up, exhausted, and terrified.

“A nurse came in,” Gloria said, her eyes red and swimming with tears. “She told me there were complications. She said my baby girl didn’t make it. She told me it was a stillbirth.”

Gloria’s voice was barely a whisper now. “They wouldn’t even let me see your body. They said it was better this way. I held a tiny funeral in Savannah. I bought a small headstone.”

“Every year on your birthday, I go to that cemetery,” she sobbed. “I leave white roses.”

I felt a sick, hollow feeling in my stomach.

“Who told you I died?” I asked.

Gloria reached into her purse. She pulled out a faded, yellowed piece of paper.

“I kept the hospital release form,” she said, sliding it across the table. “I kept it because it was the only proof I had that you ever existed.”

I picked up the paper. It was an official document from the Glynn County Community Hospital, dated November 14, 1986.

It listed the birth of a baby girl. And right below that, it had a stamped box for “Stillborn.”

At the bottom of the page, there was a signature line for the attending staff member who certified the release of the body.