He waited a long time before he answered. Long enough that I heard the fridge humming. “She found her,” he said. “The baby. The one you had at sixteen.” I want to tell you I said something, but I didn’t.

I gave that little girl up the summer before my junior year and I had spent forty years pretending that part of me didn’t exist. Nobody talked about it. Not ever. And my mother, the same woman I just learned was sleeping on a bench, had quietly tracked her down and been sending her money for six years without a single word to me.

“She’s twenty-eight now,” Dale said. “Lives two towns over. Your mom didn’t want you finding out like this. She wanted to be the one.” Then he slid a folded paper across the table toward me, the same kind of cheap paper that key tag was on. My hands were shaking so bad I could barely open it. There was a phone number. And a name written in my mother’s careful old-lady cursive.

“Her name’s Hannah,” he said softly. “She’s been asking about you.”

I haven’t called her yet. The paper’s been sitting on my nightstand for two days. I keep picking it up and setting it back down. Dale warms up my side of the bed every night like always, and every night I lie there next to the number and I think about a girl named Hannah, two towns over, who has my mother’s handwriting and my whole life folded up in her hands.

I keep thinking about that night at the table, and how I’d had it so backward. After he told me her name, Dale finally reached over and put his hand on top of mine.

His hands were rough from the dock, and warm. “I’m sorry I let you think the worst of me,” he said. “I just couldn’t break a promise to your mom.” I told him I was the one who should be sorry. For the three weeks of silence. For the slippers I turned into a stranger. For every overnight shift I’d resented while he was out there keeping all of us standing.

I asked him how she sounded, Hannah, when he’d spoken to her. He smiled a little, tired. “Like you,” he said. “She does that same thing where she stops to think before she answers.” I had to leave the kitchen for a minute after that. I stood in the dark hallway by the kids’ empty rooms and pressed my hand over my mouth so he wouldn’t hear me.

This morning I went and saw my mother. She opened the door of that little apartment, the one I’d snuck into like a burglar, and she looked at me a long time. Then she said, real quiet, “She has your laugh.”

I called the number from her kitchen table. My mother held my hand the whole time it rang. Hannah picked up on the third ring.