I sat down on the floor. Just sat right down in my own hallway with the hammer next to me. Hannah was saying something but I couldn’t really hear her. Fifty-six years. The mirror. She’d hung this same mirror in her own hallway, with the baby tucked behind the glass, so that every morning when she checked her hair she was really looking at a child she gave away. And I’d just bought it for twenty-five dollars.

I called the estate lawyer that afternoon. I didn’t even have a plan for what I’d say. His name was Mr. Dunn, older guy, careful with his words. I told him about the photo and the writing on the back. There was this long pause. Then he said, “Can you tell me your date of birth?” That was a weird question to me. But I told him.

He got quiet again. Then he said the woman, her name was Eleanor, never married. Never had children that anyone knew of. But there was one strange thing in her will that he’d always wondered about. A trust. “She set it up in 1967,” he said. “It’s been sitting there ever since.” A trust for a child. A child placed through a private adoption agency. In Savannah.

I couldn’t talk for a second. Because I was adopted. Through a private agency. In Savannah. In 1967. I have never in my life known one single thing about my birth mother, and honestly, I never tried to. That’s the part I’m not proud of. People always asked if I wanted to find her, and I’d get this hard little knot in my chest and say no. She gave me up. Why would I go chasing somebody who didn’t want me. I said that for fifty years. I really believed it.

“Mr. Dunn,” I said, and my voice came out funny, “what’s the name on that trust?”

He said it was set up in the child’s birth name. The name the agency was given by the mother.

And then he said something that made me grab the edge of the kitchen counter. He said that same name appears on my original birth certificate. The real one. The one the court sealed up tight the day I got adopted so nobody could ever open it. He’d be able to confirm it through the agency records, he said, but he was almost sure.

“The certificate lists the mother,” he said slowly, like he knew this was a grenade. “It lists her by name.”

I just stood there. The whole kitchen felt very far away. Fifty-six years of telling everyone she didn’t want me. Fifty-six years of refusing to look. And the whole time she had my baby picture behind a mirror, looking at it every single morning, because that’s all she was ever allowed to have of me.

“Tell me,” I said. “Just tell me her name.”