I sat down at the kitchen table and looked at my own name in that hard black government type for a while before I could make myself open it.

Because I had a file of my own.

For most of my adult life — seven years of it in earnest — I’d kept a private folder in my desk drawer that no one else ever saw.

Cold-case requests.

Petitions to unseal records.

Letters to agencies that answered, when they answered at all, with the same soft dead end.

I had spent my whole life looking for the three siblings who were pulled out of my arms on the shoulder of Highway 9 when I was seven years old, and I had never found so much as a thread.

Every Christmas with my five kids, every birthday, every ordinary wonderful milestone, a quiet corner of me had stayed anchored out on that cold highway, still reaching for three faces I could barely remember and had never stopped loving.