I asked her, finally, when her birthday was. I don’t even know why that’s what came out. She gave me a funny look and said October. The fourteenth. And I had to grab the edge of the table, because my sister was born October the fourteenth, 1958, and I have lit a little candle for her every October the fourteenth for as long as I can remember, never once knowing if she was alive to have a candle lit for her.

She was adopted, she told me, slow now, watching my face. The card came tucked in her baby blanket. The agency let her keep it. It was the only thing she had from before. Her whole life she’d made that pie not even knowing the woman’s name, just that somebody once loved her enough to send a recipe along with her into the world.

I think I said her name. Her real one. Baby Ann. I think I said it out loud right there by the coffee. I don’t fully remember. What I remember is her hand on my arm getting tighter, and her face changing, and the two of us just standing in the middle of a church bake sale while everybody around us went on cutting pie and counting change like the whole world hadn’t just cracked open.

I haven’t told her everything yet. About the funeral. About Aunt Ruth saying leave it be. About all those years I could have looked and didn’t. That part’s still sitting in my chest like a stone, and I don’t know how you say sorry for sixty years to somebody you just met at a coffee urn.

She kept the card. I told her to. It’s hers. Mama wrote it for both of us but she’s the one who carried it.

We’re getting coffee next week. The real kind, at a diner, not church styrofoam. I keep starting to call her and then putting the phone down, because what do you even say.

I’m sixty-some years old and I found my baby sister over a slice of apple pie, and I still can’t get the words out. I never could, with her. Not when she was eight months old. Not now.