Part 4 — Finding Diane
Diane Whitfield still lived forty minutes from the hospital, in a town two counties over from ours — the same town, it turned out, where the regional youth music festival was held every spring. A detail that meant nothing to me yet, and everything later.
I spent three days writing and rewriting a letter before I finally just picked up the phone. My hands were shaking so badly I had to try twice to get the numbers right.
She picked up on the fourth ring. I introduced myself, said I was calling about something that happened eighteen years ago at Millbrook County, and asked if she had a daughter born there around the same time as mine.
The silence on the other end went on so long I thought she’d hung up.
“How did you find me,” she finally said. Not a question. A statement, flat and terrified.
“DNA testing,” I told her. “My daughter and I share zero percent DNA. So does my husband. I’ve spent two months finding out why.”
I heard her start to cry before she said another word.
We met four days later at a coffee shop exactly halfway between our two towns, both of us too anxious to have this conversation in either of our homes. Diane was small, blonde, maybe five years older than me, and the moment she sat down across from me I could see it — the resemblance. Not to me. To Ellie. The same slight gap in her front teeth. The same way her eyebrows arched when she got nervous.
“I need you to understand,” Diane said before I’d even ordered coffee, her hands wrapped so tight around her cup that her knuckles had gone white, “that I have hated myself every single day for eighteen years.”
Then she told me everything.
