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

Seventeen times she had reached for me, and seventeen times a hand I could not see had cut the line.

I have never been able to get past that number.

Seventeen.

Not one call, made once, in a moment of panic and then abandoned.

Seventeen separate times, over weeks, a frightened pregnant woman had picked up a phone and dialed my office, had pushed past whatever pride and fear it cost her, had tried again after being turned away, and again, and again — seventeen acts of hope, each one requiring her to believe, against mounting evidence, that if she could just reach me, I would answer.

And on my end, I felt nothing, knew nothing, because my mother had arranged the world so that not one of those seventeen reachings ever produced so much as a ripple in my day.