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30.

Lionel’s car was a boxy gray Volvo with cracked leather seats and a vague smell of spoiled milk, despite being spotlessly clean. It gave off the impression of a hand-me-down from his mother, perhaps because of the girls preparatory school sticker that was peeling off the bumper. He drove with his hands fixed firmly at ten and two, perched up on the edge of his seat in order to get a good perspective over the dashboard.

The roads were quiet, the city still rubbing sleep from its eyes. As we drove south on Highway 101, the clouds began to break, revealing a milky blue sky. To the east, the chop of the San Francisco Bay was clotted with sailboats and windsurfers, tilting against the wind. To the west, pine-covered hills blockaded the coastal fog.

Lionel handed me a stack of printouts. “Here, tell me what to do. I mapquested it.”

“Mapquested?”

“New website, just launched. Searchable digitized maps of everything. You type in your destination and it gives you turn-by-turn directions that you can print out.” He looked genuinely happy for the first time since I met him. “It’s a game-changer . The kind of thing the internet was made for, you know? Thomas Guides are so fucked.”

After forty minutes, we turned off the freeway. Lionel’s directions wove us left and right and finally landed us in a neighborhood where the streets were shaded by oak trees and there were no sidewalks. The homes were mostly low and sprawling, single-story ranch homes surrounded by tangles of bushes and leaf-strewn lawns; but these were interspersed with looming new builds that stretched into the corners of their lots, imposing houses that looked like they belonged in the Italian countryside. I’d never seen anything like them.

Every time we passed a house that had been painted blue, my pulse would accelerate, wondering if this was where I’d been born. I imagined climbing the steps to one of these houses, knocking at the door, and the woman with wavy blond hair who would open it, her face crumpled with shock. Pulling me into her jasmine-scented arms, crying my baby is alive, ushering me into a kitchen to feed me oven-fresh chocolate chip cookies . A reunion that would somehow make everything else—the guilt of what I’d done that was eating away at me, the horror of my name on the front page of The New York Times —dwindle away into insignificance. Having a mother again would somehow fix everything.

“This is where Silicon Valley money lives,” Lionel offered, filling the silence. “Computer industry, VC, that kind of thing. I actually grew up in Los Altos, a few towns over. Steve Jobs’s garage was six blocks away.”

“Steve Jobs?” I realized I was coming off like a particularly clueless parrot.

“You know…Apple?” I nodded tentatively. The computers, yes, I’d seen them all over the Signal office. “The founder. He’s kind of my hero.”

I looked out at the houses, their driveways filled with understated European station wagons, shiny bikes left lying on their sides and rope swings dangling from the gnarled limbs of the oaks. My father had worked in tech, too, I realized. If we’d stayed in the place where I’d been born, would my life have been similar to Lionel’s? A Swedish sedan to drive, an all-girls private school, a post-collegiate shared apartment in San Francisco. For the first time since I’d found my birth certificate, I realized that I’d been robbed of not just a mother but a whole different life.

Maybe it isn’t too late to get it back, I thought. Maybe I’d move right back in with my mother and begin to rebuild my life. I could start fresh, abandoning everything that had come before. Become Esme Nowak for real, rather than feeling like an imposter trying on someone else’s skin.

The line between hope and delusion can be awfully narrow sometimes.

Lionel was craning to see the directions in my hand. “Oh shit, number fifty-three. We’re here.”

He veered over to the side of the road and stopped.

“This can’t be it,” I said.

There was no blue-painted house at this address. There was no house at all. All that remained of whatever had once stood at 53 Catalpa Drive was a mailbox and a vast brown swath of dirt. Two bulldozers sat idle in a pitted asphalt driveway that currently led to nowhere, next to a dumpster and a dusty blue Porta Potty. It looked like a giant had wandered by and scraped the lot clean with his trowel.

“Oh man,” Lionel whispered.

We got out of the car and stood there, staring at the construction site, as if expecting a house to suddenly materialize out of the dirt.

After a few minutes, an older woman in a lemon-yellow sweatsuit appeared at the end of the street, half stumbling after a Labrador retriever that strained at its leash. When she got close, Lionel flagged her down.

“Hey, do you know how we could find the woman who lived here?”

The dog lunged toward us, its tail wagging so hard that its entire back half wiggled. The woman came to a stop several feet away, reeling her dog in like a fish on a line. “You mean, the Trevantes? You’re upset about this, too? They’re building some modern monstrosity, totally out of character with the neighborhood. Believe me, I complained.”

Lionel shot me a questioning look. “Not the Trevantes,” I said firmly. “Nowak.”

The dog whined to be let free. The woman shook her head. “No, sorry. That’s not who owns this place. You’ve got it wrong.” She began to walk again, giving us a wide berth.

“What happened to the people who lived here before?” I called after her.

She shrugged. “As long as I’ve lived here, it’s been Trevante. And I’ve been here a decade.”

She vanished and Lionel turned to me. “I’m really sorry.”

I kicked at a clod of dirt, sending it flying into the empty lot. “I really thought she’d be waiting for me.”

“Probably she is.” Lionel’s eyes had gone soft and introspective behind his glasses. “She must have moved sometime after you were born. Probably your mom is still waiting for you wherever that is.”

“But that could be anywhere,” I realized helplessly. “My father never told me anything about where we moved from. I just assumed it was Silicon Valley because he said he worked there. All I really know is that when I ‘died’ we were living somewhere within driving distance of Big Sur. But that could be so many places.”

“Most of California.” Lionel exhaled softly. He looked up and down the street, nervously turning his keys in his hands. “So…now what? Do you want to go ring doorbells or something?”

“And see if people know the current whereabouts of someone who lived here eighteen years ago? Seems unlikely.”

The denuded lot was as naked as a blank notebook page. I breathed in deeply, smelling nothing except a faint chemical tang from the Porta Potty and a whiff of diesel engine fuel. Now that I was standing in front of the address, it seemed stupidly childish to have believed that my mother might be still waiting there, frozen in time, after all these years. Waiting for a dead child to miraculously return. Only a fool would do that.

I kicked another clod of dirt, so violently that Lionel’s eyes popped with alarm. “Let’s just go,” I said.