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I have never said those words out loud in thirty-five years, and I will tell you exactly why I said them last Tuesday. My mother was standing in the kitchen of the house I grew up in — the house on Laurel Street in Asheville with the crooked porch and the blue shutters she painted herself in 1994 — and she had just told me, for the fourth time in as many months, that she thought it was "unwise" of me to try to find my biological mother. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of me that I had not touched. My father was reading a newspaper he was not reading. I had flown in from Portland for a long weekend that was supposed to be about nothing, and somehow, in the first forty minutes of the visit, we were already in this conversation again. And then I said it. I said the sentence I had rehearsed in my head during every therapy session for the last two years but had sworn I would never actually say. "Sometimes I wish you'd never adopted me." My mother set down the dish towel she was holding. My father put down the newspaper. And what happened next has been happening in my head on a loop for seven days straight.