Fremont was forty miles of flat cornfields and old barns. The rain was hitting my windshield in heavy, grey sheets. I kept thinking about my childhood. My father had left when I was a toddler.

My mother, Clara, had raised me alone in a small, damp house near the gypsum docks. She had worked as a billing clerk for the local school district. She was a quiet, nervous woman who clipped grocery coupons and never kept photos of herself from before I was born.

“We don’t need a past, Brenda,” she used to tell me when I asked about her childhood in Pennsylvania. “We have each other. That is enough.”

I arrived at the address on Route 6 just after sunrise. It was a gravel lot tucked behind an old tractor repair shop. A faded, cream-colored single-wide trailer sat at the back of the property. The metal siding was streaked with green mold. A small sign taped to the front window read: “Rent $420.”

I parked the Chevy. My knees felt weak as I walked up the three wooden steps to the porch. The screen door was rusted at the hinges. I knocked.

When the door opened, a woman in her early fifties stood there. She wore a faded blue apron over a gray sweatshirt. Her hair was silver-gray, pulled back in a loose bun. But it was her eyes that stopped my breath. They were the exact same shape as Maya’s. The same pale, glassy green.

She didn’t look at my face. She looked right past my shoulder. She was staring at my car. Specifically, she was looking at the small framed photo of Maya that I always kept on my dashboard.

Patricia’s hand shot out and gripped the wooden doorframe. Her knuckles went completely white.

She looked like she might fall down right there on the porch.

“How old is she?” Patricia whispered. Her voice was thin, like dry leaves scraping across concrete.

“She’s 14,” I said. My voice cracked. “Her name is Maya. She’s in the hospital. She needs your blood.”

Patricia’s face didn’t just tear up. It collapsed. A deep, guttural sob came out of her throat. She covered her mouth with a hand that was shaking uncontrollably.

“Come inside,” she choked out. “Please. Just come inside.”

The inside of the trailer was clean but desperately poor. There was a small kitchen with a yellow laminate table and a single metal chair. On the counter sat a blue plastic rosary case. It was identical to the one my mother Clara used to keep on her nightstand. My heart started beating so hard I could hear it in my ears.

Patricia didn’t offer me tea. She went straight to a small metal filing cabinet in the corner. She pulled out a small, rectangular tin box with a faded picture of Scotch-Irish shortbread on the lid.

“I was 16,” Patricia said. She sat down at the table, her hands trembling as she pried the lid off the tin. “I was a foster kid in Sandusky. No family. No money. I got pregnant by a boy who ran off to Indiana. The county sent me to Mercy Hospital to have the baby. It was September of 1990.”