Briar Glen was smaller than I imagined, with a single business district and a river that cut behind a former textile mill.

The Alden building stood at the end of a quiet lane, its windows painted white from the inside.

A delivery company now used part of the grounds to store trucks.

The clinic sign had been removed, leaving pale letters against dark brick.

I parked across the street and stared at a doorway that might have been the first doorway my mother carried me through.

An employee came outside to smoke and told me the building had belonged to a medical charity before the warehouse company moved in.

He knew nothing about the old records.

At the public library, a reference specialist named Priya Shah showed me the local newspaper archive and explained which documents had been transferred to the county.

She did not treat my questions as a scandal or a curiosity.

She asked what I wanted to know first.

I surprised myself by saying I wanted my birth date confirmed.

My driver’s license said May 17, but my mother had always celebrated on the nineteenth because she said the first two days of my life belonged to the hospital.

Priya found an announcement listing an Evelyn Pierce of Oak Harbor as the adoptive parent of a baby girl through a licensed agency.

The announcement was printed in late June, six weeks after the date on my license.

It named an agency called Lantern House Services rather than Alden Family Center.

When I asked whether the two organizations were connected, Priya found the agency’s former address.

It had occupied two rooms above the clinic’s administrative wing.

I photographed the listing and sat back, feeling that ordinary paperwork had rearranged the history of my life.

The reference librarian advised me to obtain my own records through the proper state process and to consult a lawyer before contacting anyone named in old files.

I appreciated her restraint.

She was not trying to build a story from strangers’ pain.

She was helping me find the first truthful sentence I could write about my own beginning.

Outside, a man was waiting beside my car.

He wore a navy jacket and held a folded printout with my face on it.

He asked whether I was Naomi Pierce.

When I said yes, he introduced himself as Graham Alden.

His grandfather had founded the clinic.

He smiled as though we were meeting at a charity lunch.