The kinship search that should have found me — Georgie’s own grandmother, two hundred miles away, listed nowhere the overworked office thought to look — was flagged “pending” and never finished.
So my granddaughter sat in foster care for two years, turned away by five families frightened of that unfinished flag, while I grieved her mother alone and had no idea she existed.
Until a church toy drive put me in the same room as her, and my heart recognized what my eyes couldn’t.
That night I took Buttons, the gray rabbit, out of Georgie’s bed while she slept, and I turned it over in my hands.
On the bottom seam, in faded laundry-marker, in my own handwriting from thirty years before, was a name.
LAUREL B.
It was Laurel’s rabbit.
Her childhood rabbit, that she’d kept all her life, and given to her own daughter.
I sat on the floor of my granddaughter’s room and wept for everything I’d lost and everything that had, impossibly, found its way back to me.
