He took a breath. “The mother listed on your birth certificate,” he said, “is the same woman whose house you bought that mirror from. Eleanor. Eleanor Pruitt.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. The woman from the estate sale.

The quiet old lady with no family and a house full of things nobody wanted. She wasn’t a stranger. She was my mother. And I’d walked through her home that Saturday, touched her teacups, paid a stranger twenty-five dollars for her mirror, and walked out without knowing she was the one person I’d spent my whole life pretending I didn’t need.

She died alone in March. I found the photo in May. Two months. I missed her by two months.

I drove out to Birch Lane that night. I don’t know why. The house was dark, the sale signs already gone. I just sat in my car across the street and looked at it. She lived less than an hour from me. All those years. We probably stood in the same grocery store. And I never once felt it.

I still have the photo. I put it back behind the mirror where she kept it, and I hung the mirror in my own hallway. Hannah thinks I should take it out and frame it proper. Maybe I will. But for now I want it the way she had it. Behind the glass. So that every morning when I’m fixing my hair, half asleep, not thinking about anything, she’s there. The same way she set it up for herself.

I never called her “Mom.” I never got to say one word to her. I keep telling myself it’s not my fault, that the records were sealed, that I couldn’t have known.

And that’s true. But it’s also true that she looked for a way to reach me for fifty-six years, and I spent those same years deciding not to be found.