They told me, in pieces, where the years had taken them.

Ruby had been through four homes before a schoolteacher in Oregon adopted her and, by every account, loved her like her own.

My brother — Silas, the tall one, our father’s build — had gone into the Navy at eighteen and spent six years quietly running my name through every military and public database he could reach from wherever they posted him.

And the youngest, Hazel, who had been barely more than a baby on that highway, had walked into a government office and registered on the state reunion database the very morning she turned eighteen, the first legal act of her adult life.