I walked into my company party and found my husband’s arm wrapped around a coworker’s waist, and then, in front of everyone, he told me I had never been anything more than his housekeeper.

Not a call, not an email, not a card.

On the eleventh day, a small padded envelope came to the house, in a handwriting I didn’t know, shaky and slanting to the right.

Inside was a single index card and a phone number.

Please call whenever you’re ready, the card said. I’ve been waiting forty-six years to meet you. Aunt Joan.

PART 5 — FINAL

I called Aunt Joan on a Tuesday night, with the phone shaking in my hand.

She answered on the second ring.

“Laura Ann,” she said, and then she couldn’t say anything else for almost a minute.

I listened to a seventy-two-year-old woman cry in a kitchen in Toledo.

It felt like rain after a long dry summer.

I drove up that Saturday with Grace in the passenger seat and Ben in the back, wearing his good jacket.

Joan lived in a little white house with a green door.