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“Okay. Thank you.” I clear my throat. “Thank you all for helping me. I appreciate it.”
Lisa calls out, “Wait, Azalea. Maybe you said it earlier and I missed it, but who are your parents?”
I freeze, staring straight ahead, not moving a muscle. It doesn’t seem like they know about me—my name would have given me away if they did—but there’s no way I can tell them the truth. “Um, I’m adopted. That’s why I’m doing this. I’m not sure of my biological parents’ names, but—” I freeze, realizing I’ve painted myself into a corner and will have to reveal a modicum of truth. “I—I think Marie…might have been my mother.”
“Oh,” says Lisa softly. “Wow. Did she have a baby?”
She must be asking her husband because he’s the one who replies. “Well, yeah, they’re the ones in the picture. The little boys.”
My head goes fuzzy. “Wait—"
They don’t seem to hear me. “This girl is Morgan’s second or third cousin, so she must be related to one of us,” Lisa mumbles, still speaking to him.
“Are you sure she isn’t lying?” he replies, and I take that as my cue to hang up.
“I actually have to go,” I say, a little louder than necessary, “but thank you so much for the help.”
I hang up before anybody can respond and immediately block the number. Then I log into my email, where I see that Morgan has already forwarded me the Facebook profile. I save the link, then go to the genealogy website and set my profile to private. I block Morgan so she can’t contact me anymore.
Only then do I paste the link into the address bar and go to my mother’s profile.
It’s her. I know as soon as I see the picture.
Her husband has his arm around her. Her wide grin reveals the same dimple that I have.
Two kids stand on either side of them, clinging to their legs and beaming at the camera with gap-toothed grins.
They’re the picture-perfect family I never had.
Justliketherearea lot of Marie Halls, there are a lot of Marie Porters listed on the public records website I’m using. Even knowing that she lives in Kansas City doesn’t help me locate her address right away. I’ve never been there, but one look at a map tells me that the city is sprawling, with lots of crooked, strange boundaries between the city and its suburbs.
I try to narrow things down by going through her friends list. My top priority is to find out the first name of her husband. It will be impossible to figure out which Marie Porter is which if I don’t know that. He doesn’t appear to have Facebook, which isn’t helpful. I look her up on every other social media website I can find, but all her profiles have strict privacy settings that don’t allow me to see much of anything except her name and picture. I can’t help but think that her information is locked down specifically to keep me away.
As a last resort, I do a Google search. The first several results are about a Marie Porter who was executed by electric chair in 1938—yikes—so I go back to the search bar and add ‘Kansas City’ to the search terms. Now the front page is full of obituaries. I click over to the news tab and scroll. More obituaries—
And then a news article.
I click on it. It’s from a local news station. The headline is about a charity ball benefiting a local hospital. I scan the page, trying to figure out where the hit on Marie’s name came from.
At the bottom of the page is a slideshow of pictures. Each features a different couple in black tie posing in front of a water fountain. Their names are listed in the caption.
I click through all the pictures, and I find her in the second-to-last one, beaming beside the same guy from her Facebook profile. The caption reads:Cardiologist Dr. Jason Porter and his wife, Marie.
His name is Jason.
Jason and Marie Porter.
I go back to the records website. I clear all the search terms I’ve used so far and search again, this time for both of their names together.
A single record pops up.
And that’s it.
I found her.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Maverick
