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Anger burns through the grief.

Sage wasn’t a runaway.

She was alone.

I scroll through the documents my investigator sent me two hours ago. He warned me that some of the information came from sources he couldn’t reveal.

I don’t care where he found it.

Mae Baxter died of a heart attack when Sage was sixteen. Her sister, Adelaide, died six years earlier. No legal adoption records exist. No custody agreement. No amended birth certificate connected to me.

Mae gave Sage her last name and raised her as her own.

I should hate her.

For years, I did.

I imagined the woman who carried my daughter away selling her to strangers. I imagined Sage growing up in a cold house with people who never loved her. I had nightmares about finding her hungry, frightened, or dead.

But the documents on my screen tell a different story.

Mae and her sister ran a small baking business from their home. Sage attended the same school from kindergarten until Mae’s death. Teachers described her as quiet, kind, and exceptionally intelligent.

There are photographs attached to the business’s old social media page.

Sage at seven, standing on a stool beside a kitchen counter covered in flour.

Sage at eleven, holding a pie.

Sage at fifteen, laughing as Mae attempts to frost a crooked birthday cake.

Mae loved her.

The realization doesn’t erase what she did, but it changes something inside me.

My baby was loved.

She knew happiness.

At least until she lost the only mother she remembered.

I press my hand over my mouth and fight to breathe.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the picture. “I tried to find you.”

For thirteen years, I have followed every lead.

The night I turned twenty-one, I climbed out my bedroom window with forty-three dollars, two shirts, and the address of a women’s shelter hidden inside my shoe. I walked nine miles before a woman found me beside the road and took me to safety.

I changed my name.

I found work.

I learned how to drive, opened my first bank account, and slowly figured out how the rest of the world lived.

Then I began looking for my daughter.

My parents left me with nothing. No paperwork. No name for the woman who delivered Sage. They claimed my baby died before leaving the house.