I was too young, too broken, and too alone to ask questions. I didn’t even ask to hold her.

I just nodded and let them take her away.

The next week, I took my savings out of the blue jar and paid the local stonemason $3,800 for a small granite headstone.

I had them carve white roses on the border. It was the only beautiful thing I could afford.

Every single Mother’s Day, I walked to that cemetery with a bunch of real white roses.

I did it when it rained. I did it when my knees started hurting from the damp grass.

I spent twenty-two years crying over a patch of sod, believing my daughter was sleeping underneath it.

But standing in that church basement, looking at Clara’s newspaper clipping, the ground under my feet felt like it was tilting.

The article said Dr. Harmon had sold at least twenty-three babies over an eighteen-year period.

He charged adoptive families up to $40,000 each, falsifying birth records and telling vulnerable mothers their infants had passed.

I didn’t say goodbye to Clara. I just walked out of the church, got into my old Chevy, and drove straight to the county records office.

The records office was quiet, smelling of old paper and dust.

The clerk behind the counter was Martha, a woman I had known since we were ten years old.

“Evelyn, what’s wrong?” she asked, looking at my pale face. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I need the birth and death certificates from April 14, 2004,” I said, my voice cracking.

Martha looked confused, but she went back to the filing cabinets anyway.

It took her fifteen minutes. When she came back, her face was completely drained of color.

She didn’t hand me the papers. She just kept her hands flat on the wooden counter.

“Evelyn,” she whispered, looking around the empty office. “There is no death certificate for your baby. None was ever filed.”

My jaw locked. I could hear my own pulse drumming in my ears.

“What do you mean?” I asked, my voice barely audible.

Martha turned the computer monitor toward me. “The birth record is here. Baby girl, born to Evelyn Vance, April 14, 2004, at 6:12 AM. Weight, seven pounds, two ounces.”

She clicked a different tab. “But look at this. Another baby girl was discharged from the same clinic at 7:30 AM that same morning. Same weight. Under a different mother’s name. An adoption file.”

The adoptive parents were Arthur and Helen Miller.

They lived on Elm Street. Just six blocks from my own house.