I want to say first that they were good parents. Are good parents. That is not the story. My adoptive parents — my parents, my real ones, the ones who raised me — took me home from a hospital in Charlotte in 1989 when I was nine days old. My mother was twenty-four. My father was twenty-six. They had a small house, a used Corolla, and no idea what they were doing. They did not hide that I was adopted. They told me when I was four, in a way I still remember — sitting on the swing on the back porch, my mother's arm around me, saying "you came to us in a different way than other babies do, and that makes you extra special." For most of my life, that was enough. I was an only child. I was loved. I was, by any measure a child could apply to their own life, happy. The thing that nobody warned me about was what happens when you turn thirty and realize the questions you never thought you had are the ones that will eat you alive.