I don’t know what happens next. I keep picking up my phone and putting it back down. I typed out a text to Sharon three times last night and deleted every one. What do you even say? “Hey, are you my mother?

Were you my mother this whole time? Were you watching me grow up from three feet away and never getting to say it?”

I donated blood because Linda made me feel guilty about it. And now I’m sitting here at midnight with a forty-year-old secret and a woman’s initial burned into my brain and I don’t know what to do with any of it. I just needed to tell someone. Even if it’s strangers on the internet. I needed to say it out loud, or type it out loud, or whatever this is. Because I can’t keep holding it by myself.