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  I touched the bundle of quilts, only to realize it was a pillow trapped under the sheets. 'Charlotte?' I said out loud. The bathroom door was wide open; I turned on the light, but she wasn't inside. Starting to worry - Was she just as upset as I was about the trial? Had she been sleepwalking? - I walked down the hallway, checking your bathroom, the guest room, the narrow staircase that led to the attic.

  The last door was your room. I stepped inside and immediately saw her. Charlotte was curled on your bed, her arm wrapped tight around you. Even in her sleep, she wasn't willing to let you go.

  I touched your hair, and then your mother's. I brushed Amelia's cheek. And then I lay down on the throw rug on the floor and pillowed my head on my arm. Go figure: with all of us together again, I fell asleep in a matter of minutes.

  Marin

  'D

  o you know what this is about?' I asked, as I hurried along the courthouse hallway beside Guy Booker.

  'Your guess is as good as mine,' he said.

  We had been called to chambers before the start of the second day of the trial. Being called to chambers, this early on, was not usually a good thing - particularly not if it was something Guy Booker didn't know about, either. Whatever pressing issue Judge Gellar had to address most likely was not one I wanted to hear.

  We were led in to find the judge sitting at his desk, his too-black hair a helmet. It reminded me of those old Superman action figures - you just knew that Superman's coif never blew around in the wind when he flew, some marvel of physics and styling gel - and it was distracting enough for me not even to notice the second person in the room, who was sitting with her back to us.

  'Counselors,' Judge Gellar said. 'You both know Juliet Cooper, juror number six.'

  The woman turned around. She was the one who - during voir dire - had been the target of Guy's intrusive questions about abortion. Maybe the defense attorney's hammering of Charlotte yesterday about the same issue had triggered a complaint. I stood up a little straighter, convinced that the reason the judge had convened us had little to do with me and much to do with Guy Booker's questionable practice of the law.

  'Ms. Cooper will be excused from the jury. Beginning immediately, the alternate juror will be rotated into the pool.'

  No lawyer likes to have the jury change in the middle of a trial, but neither do judges. If this woman was being excused, it must have been for a very good reason.

  She was looking at Guy Booker, and very deliberately not looking at me. 'I'm sorry,' she murmured. 'I didn't know I had a conflict of interest.'

  Conflict of interest? I had assumed it was a health issue, some emergency that required her to fly to the bedside of a dying relative or go immediately for chemo. A conflict of interest meant that she knew something about my client or Guy's - but surely she would have realized this during jury selection.

  Apparently, Guy Booker felt the same way. 'Is it possible to hear what the conflict is, exactly?'

  'Ms. Cooper is related to one of the parties in this case,' Judge Gellar said, and he met my gaze. 'You, Ms. Gates.'

  I used to imagine that I saw my birth mother everywhere and just didn't know it. I'd smile an extra moment longer at the lady who handed me my ticket at the movie theater; I'd make conversation about the weather with my bank teller. I'd hear the cultured voice of a receptionist at a rival firm and imagine that it was her; I'd bump into a lady in a cashmere coat in the lobby downstairs and stare at her face as I apologized. There were any number of people I could cross paths with who might be my mother; I could run into her dozens of times each day without ever knowing.

  And now she was sitting across from me, in Judge Gellar's chambers.

  He and Guy Booker had left us alone for a few minutes. And to my surprise, even with almost thirty-six years' worth of questions, the dam didn't break down easily. I found myself staring at her hair - which was a frizzy red. All my life, I'd looked different from the other people in my family, and I had always assumed that I was a carbon copy of my birth mother. But I didn't resemble her, not at all.

  She was holding on to her purse with a death grip. 'A month ago I got a phone call from the courthouse,' Juliet Cooper said. 'Saying that they had some information for me. I thought something like this might happen one day.'

  'So,' I said, but my voice was wheezy, dry. 'How long have you known?'

  'Only since yesterday. The clerk mailed me your card a week ago, but I couldn't make myself open it. I wasn't ready.' She looked up at me. Her eyes were brown. Did that mean my father's had been blue, like mine? 'It was what happened in court yesterday - all those questions about the mother wanting to get rid of her baby - that made me finally get up the nerve to do it.'

  I felt as if I'd been pumped full of helium: surely, then, this meant that she hadn't really wanted to give me up, just like Charlotte hadn't really wanted to give up Willow.

  'When I got to the end of the card, I saw your name, and realized I knew it already, from the trial.' She hesitated. 'It's a pretty unique name.'

  'Yes.' What had you wanted to call me instead? Suzy, Margaret, Theresa?

  'You're very good,' Juliet Cooper said, shyly. 'In court, I mean.'

  There was three feet of space between us. Why wasn't either of us crossing it? I had imagined this moment so many times, and it always ended with my mother holding me tight, as if she needed to make up for ever having let me go.

  'Thank you,' I said. Here's what I hadn't realized: the mother you haven't seen for almost thirty-six years isn't your mother, she's a stranger. Sharing DNA does not make you fast friends. This wasn't a joyous reunion. It was just awkward.

  Well, maybe she was as uncomfortable as I was; maybe she was afraid to overstep her bounds or assumed I held a grudge against her for giving me up in the first place. It was my job, then, to break the ice, wasn't it? 'I can't believe that I spent all this time looking for you and you turned up on my jury,' I said, smiling. 'It's a small world.'

  'Very,' she agreed, and went dead silent again.

  'I knew I liked you during voir dire,' I said, trying to make a joke, but it fell flat. And then I remembered something else Juliet Cooper had said during jury selection: She used to be a stay-at-home mother. She'd only gone back to work when her children went to high school. 'You have kids. Other kids.'

  She nodded. 'Two girls.'

  For an only child, that was remarkable: Not only had I found my birth mother but I had gained siblings. 'I have sisters,' I said out loud.

  At that, something shuttered in Juliet Cooper's eyes. 'They are not your sisters.'

  'I'm sorry. I didn't mean--'

  'I was going to write you a letter. I was going to send it to the Hillsborough court and ask them to forward it to you,' she said. 'Listening to Charlotte O'Keefe brought it all back for me: there are just some babies who are better off not being born.' Juliet stood up abruptly. 'I was going to write you a letter,' she repeated, 'and ask you not to contact me again.'

  And just like that, my birth mother abandoned me for the second time in my life.

  When you're adopted, you may have the happiest life in the world, but there's always a part of you that wonders if you'd been cuter, quieter, an easy delivery - well, maybe then your birth mom wouldn't have given you up. It's silly, of course - the decision to give a child up for adoption is made months in advance - but that doesn't keep you from thinking it all the same.

  I had gotten straight As in college. I'd graduated at the top of my law school class. I did this, of course, to make my family proud of me - but I didn't specify which family I was talking about. My adoptive parents, sure. But also my birth parents. I think there was always a hidden belief that if my birth mother stumbled across me and saw how smart I was, how successful, she couldn't help but love me.

  When in fact, she couldn't help but leave me.

  The door of the conference room opened, and Charlotte slipped inside. 'There was a reporter in the ladies' room. She came after me with a microphone while I was goin