I had already lost Evan once without knowing the full truth of his life.
I wasn’t going to lose this part of him too.
Somewhere in those pictures was a woman who might have carried my son’s child.
I was going to find her.
I stopped looking at the photos like a grieving mother and started looking at them like a detective.
I went through every image a second time, writing down anything useful — storefront names, street numbers, a calendar visible on a kitchen wall, anything printed clearly enough to read.
The ultrasound gave me my first real lead. I zoomed in until the picture blurred at the edges. Most of the patient information was cropped out, but one word remained legible: Celine.
Beneath it, a clinic name and a date. I stared at that date for a long time.
The timing fit. If the baby was Evan’s, Celine would have been exactly that far along when the photo was taken.
The next morning I called the clinic.
“I’m trying to locate a patient who was treated there around 1999,” I explained.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said gently, “we aren’t able to confirm patient records, even after this many years.”
I understood. That didn’t make hanging up any easier.
So I went back to the photographs.
This time I noticed something I’d missed before. In one candid shot, Celine sat laughing at a kitchen table while Evan apparently snapped the picture without warning. Behind her, propped against a sugar bowl, sat a small stack of mail.
I zoomed in. One envelope was mostly hidden. Another was angled wrong. But on the third, I could make out part of a street name and an apartment number.
I wrote both down and drove to the library that afternoon.
I dug through old city directories first, then local newspaper archives, then community bulletins scanned into the historical collection.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Then, buried in a church newsletter from the spring after Evan died, sandwiched between a bake sale announcement and a choir schedule, I found a birth notice.
