They'd had a daughter before me. Her name was Mary Beth. She was born in August 1988 — eleven months before I was born. She died of SIDS on her hundred-and-forty-first day on earth. My mother found her. My father had to pry my mother out of the nursery that night. They did not tell anyone they were adopting me when they applied. They didn't tell their families until I was home and the paperwork was signed. They were twenty-four and twenty-six and they had buried their first child six months earlier, and the agency had told them they were too fragile to qualify, and they'd lied on the application. They had lied about being ready. They had brought me home out of a grief so violent that my mother said, sitting at that kitchen table, "I cannot tell you I was a good mother to you in the beginning, sweetheart. I loved you. But I was not okay. And sometimes, yes, I have wondered what our lives would look like if we had waited. If we had grieved first. If I had been a better mother to you than I was able to be in those first years." And then she started crying.