"Sometimes I wish you'd never adopted me." I knew it was a bomb before it left my mouth. I knew I didn't mean it. I knew what I actually meant was, "Why are you making this so hard for me?" But what came out was the bomb. My mother didn't cry. That was the worst part. She looked at my father, and my father looked at her, and something silent passed between them — some twenty-nine-year-old conversation I had never been party to, a whole story written in a glance. And my mother said, very softly, eight words that have redrawn the map of my entire childhood. "Sometimes, honey, we wish the same thing too." I thought I was going to pass out. I sat at that kitchen table and the room went very bright and very far away, and I said, in a voice that didn't sound like mine, "What does that mean?" My mother sat down across from me. She took my hand. She said, "Let me tell you what we've never told you." And then she told me something I am still trying to understand a week later.