I paid twenty-five dollars for that mirror. I figured the worst that could happen was it’d look ugly in my hallway. I was up on a step stool with a hammer in my mouth, trying to get it level, when the paper backing slipped loose and something fell out and hit the floor by my foot.

A little square of stiff paper, face down. I almost didn’t pick it up.

The mirror came from an old house out on Birch Lane. There was an estate sale that Saturday, the kind where everything’s got a sticker on it and strangers paw through a dead person’s whole life. The woman who lived there had passed at 89. No kids, the lady running the sale said. No family really. Just a quiet old house full of nice old things nobody wanted. I bought the mirror and a set of teacups and didn’t think twice.

So I bent down and turned the paper over. It was a photograph. Black and white, the corners soft from being handled. A young woman, maybe twenty, holding a baby up against her shoulder. On the back, in pencil, faded almost gray: 1967. That’s all. Just the year.

I was still looking at it when Hannah came down the stairs. My daughter. She got about three steps down and stopped dead. “Mom.” She didn’t say it loud. She just kind of breathed it. “Mom, that woman looks exactly like me.”

And here’s the thing. She was right. I held it up next to her face and my hands weren’t steady. Same jaw. Same heavy eyebrows. Same way of tipping the chin up like she’s daring you to say something. I’ve watched Hannah make that face her whole life. I make it too. We always figured she got it from me. But I’m adopted. I don’t actually know where I got anything from.

The baby in the photo was wrapped tight in a blanket, and right there on its tiny wrist you could see a hospital band. I don’t know why that’s the detail that got me. The little plastic band. I think because it meant the picture was taken the same day that baby was born. Somebody had a camera ready in a hospital room in 1967, and then somebody hid the picture behind a mirror.

I turned it back over and that’s when I saw there was more writing under the date. Smaller. Crammed into the bottom edge like she was running out of room or out of nerve. “To the child I never held,” it said. My stomach went cold and tight. “I put your picture where I could see you every morning.” I had to read it twice. “If someone finds this after I’m gone, please know I looked at you every day for 56 years.”