Inside, I never stopped being an eight-year-old girl who’d failed to protect her little sister.
The random moments were the worst—seeing sisters together and remembering what I’d lost
Some years, I’d spend months obsessively searching online adoption registries and reunion websites, sending messages to administrators, paying for background check services that led nowhere.
Other years, I couldn’t handle hitting the same dead end again and would avoid anything adoption-related entirely.
But the random moments were the hardest.
I’d be walking through Target and see two sisters arguing over which cereal to get, and I’d have to leave my cart and walk out because my chest felt too tight to breathe.
I’d see a little girl with brown pigtails holding her big sister’s hand at the park, and I’d have to look away before the tears started.
A colleague would complain about her sister borrowing clothes without asking, and I’d smile and nod while thinking “at least you know where she is.”
Mia became a ghost I couldn’t properly mourn because I didn’t know if she was alive or dead, happy or suffering, still thinking about me or having completely forgotten the sister who’d abandoned her.
Fast-forward to last October. I was forty years old, divorced, childless, working as a senior marketing manager for a mid-sized tech company.
My boss sent me on a three-day business trip to Rochester, New York—not even an interesting city, just a place with an office park, a Hampton Inn, and one halfway decent coffee shop according to Yelp.
