Dr. Aris shook his head slowly. “The database doesn’t make mistakes like this, Clara. The missing woman was twenty-one when she disappeared. Her name was Sarah Jennings. She lived in a small apartment in Canton, Ohio.

And according to the public record, her registered roommate at that address was a nineteen-year-old woman named Evelyn Brooks.”

I sat there. The paper underneath me crinkled as my body went completely rigid. Evelyn Brooks was my mother’s maiden name.

“Evelyn is my mother,” I said, my voice barely carrying over the sound of the clinic’s air conditioning.

“According to the missing person file, Sarah Jennings was eight months pregnant with twins when she disappeared,” Dr. Aris said, his eyes fixed on mine. “The police back then suspected foul play, but they never found her. And they never found the babies.”

I didn’t say another word. I didn’t cry. My legs felt like lead as I slid off the exam table. I grabbed my purse, ignoring the sharp pain in my knee as I walked out of the office, leaving Dr. Aris calling after me down the hallway.

I hobbled out to my old Buick in the parking lot and shut the door, blocking out the sound of the afternoon traffic. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped my keys twice on the floor mat.

I needed to think. My mother, Evelyn, had raised me in a tiny, quiet house on the outskirts of Mansfield. She was a seamstress. She spent her days sewing curtains and altering prom dresses for the local high school girls.

We were poor, but it was a quiet, careful kind of life. My mother clipped coupons, grew her own green beans in a small backyard plot, and drove an old station wagon until the floorboards rusted through.

But she was also incredibly private. She homeschooled me until the sixth grade, claiming the public schools weren’t safe. She never let me go to sleepovers. She never took photos of me when I was a baby. When I asked about them, she always said our old apartment had flooded and all her boxes of pictures were destroyed.

And then there was the blue enamel sewing tin.

It sat on the top shelf of her sewing room, right next to her heavy iron. She told me never to touch it because it contained her mother’s antique needles, and they were too sharp. I had never seen her open it. Not once in twenty-eight years.

I picked up my phone and called her.

She answered on the third ring. “Clara? Did the doctor give you a date for the surgery?”

Her voice was warm, completely normal. She sounded like the woman who had made me chicken noodle soup when I had the flu, the woman who had helped me pay for my first semester of community college by selling her grandmother’s silver spoons.