A Flight Delay Stranded Me at O’Hare, Where I Found the Ex Who Vanished Six Years Ago Asleep Against a Wall With Two Little Boys Who Had My Eyes — Then My Mother Appeared With a Lawyer and a Folder, and Inside It Was a Letter Renouncing My Own Children, Signed With a Signature I Never Wrote

“Are they mine?” She nodded, once.

And then she reached into a worn tote bag and drew out a thick stack of paper bound with a rubber band, and set it in my hands, and I understood as I looked at it that I was holding the physical shape of the six years I had lost.

Unopened letters, addressed in my own hand to my own office, every one stamped RETURN TO SENDER.

Printouts of emails to an account I’d long abandoned.