I couldn’t move. My hands were still resting on the edge of the wooden table, and they were shaking so hard I had to grab the wood to keep from knocking the tomatoes over. I thought I had buried that year deep. I thought I had left it in a dark room in my memory, locked away behind forty years of marriage and a house full of normal, quiet memories.

“You look just like the woman in the photograph,” she whispered.

She reached into her oversized bag and pulled out a faded, yellowed piece of paper. It was a birth record. It was mine. My name was on it, right there in black ink, clear as day. I had never told a living soul. Not even Arthur. He knew I couldn’t have children, and he had been so good about it, so patient and kind. We had built a life around that empty space, and I had spent my whole adulthood pretending that space didn’t have a history.

“I’ve been looking for a long time,” she said.

I looked at her face. I saw the shape of my own nose. I saw the way her eyebrows arched, just like mine did when I was worried. It was like looking into a mirror that had been shattered and taped back together by someone who didn’t quite know where the pieces went.

“I didn’t want to intrude,” she said.

I wanted to say something, but my throat was tight. I felt like I was choking on a secret that had finally decided it was tired of being a secret.

I remembered the way they had taken her away. They told me it was for the best. They told me a sixteen-year-old girl with no husband couldn’t possibly raise a baby. They made me sign papers while I was still shaking from the delivery.

“I just needed to know if you were real,” she said.

She started to cry then. It wasn’t a loud, dramatic cry. It was just silent tears running down her cheeks, the kind that come when you’ve been holding your breath for a lifetime. I looked at her, and I saw the girl I had been back in 1963. I saw the fear. I saw the shame that they had drilled into me so hard I couldn’t ever pull it out.

“I am real,” I managed to say.

My voice sounded small, like a stranger’s voice. I walked around the end of the stand. I didn’t care about the tomatoes or the money or the neighbors who might see us. I walked around the wood and I reached out. I didn’t know if I should hug her, if I was allowed to, but I did it anyway.