Page 150 of Dying to Meet You

“When was the last time you saw her?”

He has to think. “I guess it was December—right before I moved to Ithaca to be with your mother,” he says. “I went to say goodbye, and she asked me for money. I didn’t have any to spare, and she called me an ungrateful bastard.”

Ouch. “What about your father?” she asks. “Where was he?”

“Who knows?” he shrugs. “He paid child support for a while. Then he stopped. That’s when my mom kind of went off the deep end.”

Something tickles the back of Natalie’s brain. “What year was that, do you think?”

“Um... Mid-nineties? Somewhere in there.”

“Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.”

He laughs suddenly. “This dinosaur has to go play some covers.” He stands up. Then he leans over and kisses the top of her head. “Lock the door behind me?”

“All right.” She rises to follow him.

“Kind of surprised your mother went out when she knows you’ll be here alone.”

Natalie shrugs. She’s kind of surprised, too. But she doesn’t want to say anything disloyal.

“I’m leaving my phone on vibrate. Call for any reason.”

“Will do.”

He slings his bass on his back and picks up his amp.

Natalie locks the door behind him and makes a bag of popcorn. She opens the next annual report. Her eyes skim the captions of the photos, on the hunt forJones.

She finds a lot of big hair, and somereallyhigh-waisted jeans. But if Betsy Jones attended the foundation picnic in the eighties, she never posed for the group photo.

And now she’s running out of years. Natalie knows the maternity home closed for good in 1989. So she pulls the 1990 report into her lap halfheartedly. She peeks at the masthead. Marcus Wincott was still running the foundation. His headshot smiles confidently out from the first page, his smile smarmy.

His “Letter from the CEO” says something about new directions for the foundation. Yada yada yada.

Natalie flips the page to a photo of four young people, linking arms and smiling. They’re all unfamiliar, and mostly unremarkable, except for one detail—two of the women are wearing silver oval medallions.

Natalie stops breathing and reads the caption. It’s a reunion! The Wincott Foundation hosted a tea for grown adoptees who were born at the maternity home.Our guests enjoyed a tour of their birth place, plus cake and conversation. We hope to make it an annual event!

The names under the photo are unfamiliar; they must have been born in the sixties. But Natalie flags the page with a Post-it to show her mother. And then she flips through more of the later issues, looking for medallions of Saint Raymond.

It takes most of an hour before she spots another one, in the report from 2001. But when she does, it makes her gasp.

The caption:Shenanigans at the Wincott Foundation Family Picnic. The photo shows a few children waiting in line for a dunking booth, while one of them aims a softball in a cocked hand.

There’s a very attractive little girl in the photo, maybe nine or ten. She’s wearing what looks to be a Saint Raymond medallion around her neck. But that’s not what’s so shocking.

First there’s her face, which is unmistakably familiar to Natalie. Even as a child, she was already beautiful. And stuck to her shirt she’s wearing a paper name tag that reads,Hello my name is... BEATRICE VESPERTINI.

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Rowan

I buy a bottle of water to split with Lickie in preparation for the walk back to the mansion. But then I’m so curious that I grab an Uber instead.

Beatrice sounded rattled.

A few minutes later, Lickie and I climb the mansion’s steps. “No chewing any hand-carved masterpieces, m’kay?” I scratch her between the ears before punching the code in the front door’s keypad.