The letter was four pages. Mrs. Whitmore was my grandmother. My mother, the sick woman I was buying medicine for, was her daughter, cast out at nineteen for a pregnancy the family found inconvenient, erased from photographs, written out of everything, and told never to return. I was the baby in the pink blanket. My grandmother had spent twenty years being told by her other children that my mother was dead and that I had never existed, until she hired a private investigator behind their backs and found us both, poor, invisible, cleaning houses for bus fare.

She could not simply appear. She was old and watched and her children controlled her paperwork. So she posted an ad, and she waited to see whether the granddaughter they had thrown away had grown up cruel, the way they insisted the whole cast-out branch had, or whether I still had, in her words, the heart this family once tried to take from you.