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apartment was small—okay, minuscule—with a bare minimum of storage space. Actually, it had only one closet at the end of a hallway that ran parallel to my bedroom but went nowhere. But I liked that it kept a limit on the amount of clutter I allowed to accumulate in my life. I had a sense that if I needed to pack up and move in a day, I could, and that thought gave me a significant amount of comfort. Which was strange because I had been there for more than ten years and had no desire to leave. There was something about that apartment that made me feel rooted and free at the same time. It was exactly the way I wanted it, with comfortable, plush furniture, and area rugs to soften the hardwood floors. The walls were freshly painted a subtle cream. It was cozy, familiar…
my
space. And yet at the same time, I had no attachment to anything there.
    That night I changed into my most comfortable pair of black yoga pants and sweatshirt, pulled my hair up, and settled onto the chenille sofa with my stack of mail to sift through. I made piles: one for magazines, one for garbage, one for bills. And I began to sort.
    It was relaxing in its mindlessness, the simple act of sifting through, putting items into their place. Then I came across an eight-by-ten envelope with my name and address handwritten in a black scrawl, no return address. There was something about it, even though it was an utterly innocuous manila envelope. In retrospect, it seemed to radiate a warning, to throb with a kind of malice, which I naturally ignored. I sliced the top open cleanly with a letter opener and removed three pieces of paper. Even now I still find it amazing how these simple items were able to challenge everything I ever thought I knew about my life.
    In the envelope there was a clipping of the
Post
article that featured a picture of me. There was also an old, yellowed Polaroid photograph. In it, a young woman in a flowered dress held a little girl on her hip. The woman looked stiff, her expression drawn. The child looked at her with eyes bright with laughter, mouth smiling. A man stood behind them, tall, broad shouldered, incredibly handsome with chiseled features and sharp, intelligent eyes. He had a possessive hand on the woman’s shoulder. And there was something about his expression that wasn’t quite benevolent, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. I couldn’t explain the constricting in my throat, the adrenaline suddenly pumping through me, causing my hands to shake. The woman in the photograph bore such a striking resemblance to me that I could have been looking at my own portrait. The child in her arms resembled pictures I’d seen of myself, though at that moment I realized I’d never seen images of myself that young.
    And there was a note including a phone number and a question.
    It read simply:
Are you my daughter?

four

    It takes only a moment to bring myself back into my childhood completely. I can close my eyes and be overcome with the sense memories of my youth. The aromas from my mother’s kitchen, the scent of Old Spice and rainwater on my father when he returned from work in the evenings, my cold fingers because my father’s body temperature always ran hot and the house, as a consequence, always cold. I can hear my parents laughing or singing, sometimes arguing, and later outright yelling when things really started to go wrong with my brother, Ace. I can remember my green shag carpet and Laura Ashley wallpaper, tiny pink roses with mint-green stems on a white background. And in all the memories I had of those years, that night with the picture in my hand there was one that stood out vivid and terrifying among all the innocuous and happy ones.
    I was fifteen and late coming home from the school paper (I was a little bit of a brain, a dork, in high school). Even though I wasn’t supposed to ride with boys in their cars, I had taken a ride from a senior named Frank Alvarez (broad shoulders, long dark hair, kind of a burnout