For then, I listened to him describe a mother who had supposedly been taken from both of us.

He had searched for twenty-four years.

He had spent immense sums, he said, employing investigators and following leads across borders.

He spoke of it as though money could measure the persistence of love.

I had spent those years in rooms where no one knew his name belonged in my story.

Both truths were difficult to fit together.

One evening, I asked what he had called me before I disappeared.

“My little bird.”