“Hello!!! Who wants to bring what for our BBQ on Sunday?” my sister prompted in our sibling group chat. My parents were out of town and our first order of business had been to call our brother and require his presence at a barbecue at Mom and Dad’s. It was the perfect location for all three of us, and a carefree way to enjoy our childhood home together. We all agreed to our parts: burger fixings from me; fruit, veggies and dip from my brother; and salad, beans, and apps from my sister.

I arrived with my family, placing our contributions in the kitchen before heading to the backyard to catch up with everyone. As we shared the latest gossip, work drama, and childhood memories, it struck me that my parents’ absence from the house left some space for one of my favorite activities—snooping through all of our old rooms to see what nostalgic relics I could find stuffed in the back of our closets. I waited until the conversation could move on without me, and slipped away.

I wandered into what used to be our old playroom—now my dad’s office, and noticed a handful of games for the Nintendo Wii abandoned on a shelf. I had taken the console with me years ago and decided I could claim these ones back. I gathered them in a neat stack as my eyes scanned the room, landing on the shelf that housed all of the family photo albums my mom had meticulously organized years before, with pictures spanning all the way back to the 70s.

They reminded me of the department store portrait that my birth mom had given me five years before, when we were first reunited. In it, I am a joyful, almost three-month-old baby snuggling what is allegedly a bunny, but can really only be described as a cuddly, silent precursor to the Furby. I guess there is a certain amount of comfort in knowing that despite the traumatic and life-altering family separation that was to follow, long eared, heavily lidded hybrid creatures would remain a constant in my life. The ones my sister and I spent hours teaching to converse with each other were probably still lurking in our boxes of memorabilia. But the photo is the last window that exists to my pre-adoption life. It was my birth mom’s final effort to capture the baby she was about to relinquish, and me blissfully unaware of what I’m about to lose.

I impulsively dug through the albums to search for evidence of the impact, and found the time in 1987 when I suddenly poofed into existence. I remember being told growing up that I constantly had a “deer in the headlights” look in my baby pictures. It was something my parents laughed about, evidence of a weird personality quirk in their strange little child. There are just a handful of pictures from that time, but in most of them, I look shell shocked. The photos taken at a portrait studio just a month or two later continued to portray me in a perpetual state of alarm. It was a noticeable and jarring change.

I carefully closed the album and approached the entrance of the upstairs hallway, remembering that I had access to something that usually felt forbidden. I listened downstairs to the sounds of my daughter laughing with my husband and siblings, and could hear that dinner was being prepared. I had time.

I expertly navigated the familiar creaks in the floorboards as I crept down the hall and into my parents’ closet. I was ready to dive into the file cabinet where they kept all our important documents, but when I arrived, it was already open, a sandy-haired, freckle-faced eight-year-old girl sitting on the floor next to it with a piece of paper in her lap. She startled when she noticed me standing there.

“It’s okay,” I reassured her, “What do you have there?”

She frowned and held up a document—a birth certificate that had been folded into thirds.

“It just has my parents’ names on it,” she observed, deflated. “But I guess that makes sense. They’re my parents. They adopted me.”

I took the paper from her hands and reassured her, “It makes sense that you wanted to find your birth parents. You deserve to know where you came from, and it’s not fair that this was taken from you.” I sat next to her, offering a hug. Her eyes welled up as she began to snuggle in. “You are going to meet them one day, you know,” I promised, “You are going to get the answers you’re looking for. I’ll make sure of it.” I looked toward the file cabinet. “Do you want to help me look for more?”

She nodded and we carefully flipped through the files, past all of the taxes, house documents and insurance plans, until we found the one titled, “Jessie’s Adoption.” The two of us perked up, straining to hear if anyone was coming to find us yet, but nothing. I turned back to the file and sifted through the documents, trying to piece together exactly why all of this happened to begin with. I had become increasingly angry with the role my parents had played in separating me from my biological family, but there was an entire institution in the middle of all of it, too. A paystub for $90.75 fell out, with my original name as a line item, for the dates that my parents had cared for me before my birth mom initially decided to parent. I snapped a quick picture. I pulled out a brochure from Catholic Community Services that used pictures of ostensibly happy adoptees to advertise their program. I captured every page, wondering if these children would approve of their images being used to erase the grief and loss of family separation. I kept digging, frantically collecting information on what I cost, what had been required of my parents, letters from all of the people involved in transferring me, and even some medical and demographic information about my birth parents that had been carefully hidden from me until this moment.

“What is all that?” the little girl asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” I told her, “but I don’t have time to figure it out right now. I better get back down there. I bet dinner will be ready soon.”

We carefully put our documents back in their file, taking care to place them exactly as we found them, and left the closet behind. Downstairs we could hear dishes being removed from the cupboard.

“I have to go,” I whispered.

She dropped her gaze and nodded. I held her once more in her longing, wishing that I could tell her that it was safe to embrace her curiosity in the open, but I couldn’t lie to her like that.

“I’ll come back when I can,” I promised.

She met my eyes with a soft smile before checking if the coast was clear. As she tiptoed back to her room to play, I made my way down the back staircase to rejoin the others, praying that no one would question my absence.