I drove home in a fog. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about that drive. I got in my house and I sat at my kitchen table and I pulled up that photo again on my phone, the one Robin texted me of the back of the picture, and I read the nurse’s signature.

And I knew it.

It took my brain a minute to catch up to my gut, but I knew that name. It was a last name I’d heard a thousand times in a salon on Bragg Boulevard. It was Diane’s last name. Diane the hairdresser. “You two could be sisters.” Diane who rolled her eyes and said everybody’s got a twin somewhere, while she stood there with my exact face cutting my hair every six weeks for nine years.

The nurse who signed that photo was Diane’s mother.

Diane’s mother had handed two babies to two families and helped a third stay with her real mom. And then thirty years later one of those babies wandered into her daughter’s salon and Diane looked at me every six weeks and never said one word.

Because she’s not the nurse’s daughter. She can’t be. The math is wrong and right at the same time and I haven’t slept since I figured it out. Diane is thirty-eight too. I checked. I went on her Facebook at two in the morning. Birthday in October.

The kept one had Robin’s name on the back of that photo. But the nurse “kept one” too. The nurse’s “daughter.” Two women who think they’re somebody’s, and neither story holds up.

I haven’t called Diane. I’ve started to four times. I get to her name in my phone and I put it down. Because I don’t actually know which question I’m asking. Whose daughter she is. Whose daughter I am. How many of us there really were that afternoon at 3 o’clock.

Robin texts me every day now. This morning she sent, “Did you ever go back and renew your license?” And I laughed for a second, the first time in two weeks.

No. I never did. My old one’s still sitting in my wallet, expired now, with a name on it I’m not even sure is mine.