He reappeared in my life in my early twenties.

I was young. Innocent. Curious. And after everything I’d been through growing up, the secrets, the silence, the aching gaps in the stories, I was sure of one thing: I needed to know who I was. Where I came from. What blood ran under my skin.

I started with her.

My birth mother.

She lived only a few hours away. I made arrangements to meet her. I was nervous but determined, this woman, this stranger, had been the mystery I’d carried my entire life. I needed answers. I needed a face to the name. I had dreamed about meeting her since I was a little girl. Between 4-9 years old, I lived in a beautiful two-story home, with a large closet with what is known as a Texas Basement. A Texas Basement is a floored attic space, typically on the other side of a door at the back of a walk-in closet. When I was told to go to bed, I would move my blankets, and pillows into this room, small but safe, in my little eyes, and I’d take my flashlight, and curl up in the security of this room, hidden from everything outside of the door. Sometimes I would read my Little House on the Prairie collection, and sometimes I would dream about her. Dream about her voice. I had convinced myself I knew how she sounded. I was too young to resent her at this point. I spent many hours, longing to be held by her. Then finally, I had that opportunity.

My adopted mother raged when she found out. She called me over and over, angry that I had dared to contact the woman who “didn’t want me”. Keep in mind, all through my childhood, she told me my birth mother loved me so much she had to let me go because she had nothing to give. A sacrificial love, she called it.

But when I found the court deposition, when I learned how hard she actually fought to keep me free from the man who had hurt her, when I wanted to meet the woman I’d held on a pedestal my whole life, my mother put me through nine kinds of hell. Guilt. Shame. Emotional blackmail. But I did it anyway.

By then I had moved out. I was on my own, in a tiny apartment, putting myself through community college. One I could afford without my parents’ income. I reached out to her, and to my surprise, she agreed to be in contact.

We spent a few days catching up. Trying to bridge the gap of two decades. She had deep brown hair; mine was white blonde. She liked the finer things. I was just trying to survive and stay in school. I couldn’t afford gas to drive three hours for a spontaneous visit, and she was disappointed, visibly, when I said I just didn’t have the money, or the capable vehicle to make it. I saw the selfishness almost immediately.

Still, I made it work. I scraped together enough money and finally made the drive.

There was no preamble. It was just one brutal declaration after the next, each syllable a tiny detonation. She said he’d attacked her. She said it with a voice like glass. Unfeeling. Unmoving. How he had shown up at her apartment to take her on a date, brandishing a bouquet of roses that was so lush and beautiful it took her breath away, and then took everything else when he pinned her against the wall. Told me in a dull monotone how he pressed her into the wallpaper and bruised her skin and dignity. She described it with the same glossy detachment as she did when she learned she was pregnant, as if narrating an event that had happened to someone else. She said the only thing preventing her from getting the abortion was what God might think – that she finally felt backed into a corner and had to run. Said the only thing I was good for, the only thing that stopped her from leaving the county, and her job, was leverage.

That I was a way out.

That I looked just like him, the man that had plagued her every waking moment. She sounded almost angry, almost accusatory, as if I had somehow chosen my own face and everything it reminded her of. And then she told me, calmly, the kind of calm that seems like ice in the veins, in precise detail, how she had planned to make money off of me. Get what she needed to get by. It was a win-win. She got paid, and I was placed with someone who would raise me up good so her conscious was clear.

I was less than nothing, and she didn’t hide it.

Her words cut through the air like threads of a rope pulling taut. There was no pity, not for herself, not for me. I realized with a sickening lurch that I wasn’t wanted here either. The only thing she truly gave me was information. She told me where he lived. Named some of the women he’d hurt. Clues, breadcrumbs, maybe closure but nothing maternal. Nothing warm.

This was the early 2000’s. Technology was still behind what it is today. There was no Ancestry.com trail, no digital paper chase. Just a landline, dial-up internet, AIM (Aol Instant Messenger) and hope. I searched online everything I could. Searched for his name. Knew he worked at a furniture store in San Antonio. Knew he loved to bowl and played basketball in his youth. Knew he was in his 40’s.

And that’s where I started.