She pointed to a red administrative stamp pressed across the following page.

“The baby was moved into the county orphanage system the next morning as a Jane Doe.”

Somebody had purposely split the birth record from the foster intake file in all the confusion.

“I could lose my pension for this,” Martha whispered.

I touched the burned edge of the thick paper.

My mother had died in that fire twenty-four years ago.

My father was a billionaire who’d spent twenty years searching for his lost family.