The little envelope sat on my kitchen counter for three weeks before I opened it. My daughter Megan gave it to me for Mother’s Day, one of those spit-in-a-tube DNA kits, and she was so proud of herself I could’ve cried. “Mom, you’ve never even tried to find out where you came from,” she said.

The thing is, I didn’t want to find out. I just didn’t want to let her down. So I spit in the tube, mailed it off, and forgot about it.

I was adopted at three days old. Closed file. My whole life my mom told me the same story, word for word, like she’d practiced it in the mirror. She found me through an agency. A young girl couldn’t keep me, the agency called, and she drove four hours to pick me up. That was the whole thing. I never searched. I figured the people who didn’t keep me already made their choice, so I made mine. Some doors you just leave shut.

When the results email finally came, I almost deleted it. 312 matches. Most of them were third and fourth cousins, names I’d never seen in my life. But one line near the top was in bold. “Close Family.” Predicted half-sibling. Her name was Janet. 44 years old. And then I saw the part that made me put my coffee down. Same hospital. Same city. Born just a year and change before me.

She messaged me before I even had time to think about messaging her. The first line knocked the wind clean out of me. “I’ve been looking for you for 20 years.” Twenty years. While I was raising kids and paying a mortgage and never once wondering, someone out there had been hunting for me the whole time.

We agreed to meet at a Panera off the highway. Neutral ground, I guess.

I got there early and picked the seat where I could watch the door. My hands would not stay still on that table. I kept flattening the paper napkin out and folding it back up.