I became a mother at seventeen and spent eighteen years believing the boy I loved had run from us. Then my son took a DNA test to find his father, and one message pulled the floor out from under everything I thought I knew.

Lately, though, he’d been asking more about Andrew.

I’d always told him the truth as I understood it. I got pregnant at seventeen, when Andrew and I were wrapped up in first love. When I told him, he smiled and nodded, promising we’d figure it out together.

The next day, he disappeared. He never came back to school. When I ran to his house that afternoon, there was a “FOR SALE” sign in the yard, and the

family

was gone.