I received the photo in the mail this morning along with a brief note, which was written in a shaky hand.

Her first and last Santa photo. As you can see, no birth mark. Let this be an end to it. Please.

I had been consumed by the mystery of my origins for most of my life. My parents never told me I was adopted, and told me to stop being ridiculous when I posited that the lack of a blood connection was the reason I was nothing like them, or anyone else in our family.

This wonder turned to obsession in high school, when I watched a documentary on a fourteen year old missing persons case. A little girl named Lillianna Bucks was kidnapped from a dress shop while her mother was inside a changing room in 1974, and as at the time the documentary went to air, no trace of her had been found.

Her parents ran an antiquarian book shop in the city, which was one of the first things to lead me to believe that I was Lillianna – I had always been a voracious reader, while my parents didn’t read anything but car maintenance manuals and take out menus. 

There was also the fact that my parents didn’t have any pictures of me before the age of three, which was Lillianna’s age when she went missing, and the fact that we looked so much alike but for one thing: I had a large port wine stain birth mark over my right eye, and Lillianna didn’t.

I couldn’t come up with an explanation for this for a very long time, until last week, when I was stabbing away at a can of spaghetti, trying to finish opening it after my can opener broke, and a piece of metal flew off the edge of the knife and hit me on my right cheekbone.

The stinging pain dredged up a memory of being held down in a chair while a tall man in an apron injected hot needles into my face. The memory was fleeting, as most very old ones are, but it strengthened my resolve. 

The ugly stain that had made me a target of childhood bullies was not a mere accident of my birth: it had been etched onto my skin on purpose. 

The fact that the charred remains of a young girl that were found under a house by a property developer in 2005 were formally announced as belonging to Lillianna did nothing to change my mind. 

Authorities admitted that there wasn’t sufficient DNA evidence left behind for them to be able to conclusively determine the girl’s identity, and that it was the torn shards of the dress she’d been found in – the one she’d been wearing on the day she went missing – that her parents had identified her by.

I had an explanation for that: my dead twin sister. My parents told me that I’d been born a twin, and that my sister Jenny had died very young – so young that they hadn’t bothered to take any pictures of her. I had a far more plausible explanation: something was wrong with Jenny.

That would certainly explain all of the doctor’s letters I found when I went snooping in my father’s study. Not general practitioners, either: specialists.

None of the correspondences included Jenny’s name – they referred to her simply as “The Girl” or “Your Child” – but what they lacked in warmth they more than made up for in detail. 

Hypotheses and diagnoses were made of everything from intellectual disabilities to mental disorders ranging from childhood schizophrenia to psychosis, all in an effort to explain the grizzly and untimely deaths of several family pets, and the stab wounds and burns sustained by my mother whenever she tried to discipline “The Child.” 

The most significant thing about the letters was that the last one was dated a week before Lillianna Buck’s kidnapping. 

I’ve been writing to the Bucks on and off for ten years – whenever a new recollection or piece of evidence comes my way – and I have remained resolute in my determination that they recognize me as their daughter, despite multiple requests to cease and desist. 

I don’t blame them; I can only imagine how difficult it must be to finally accept that your child is dead, only to discover she grew up forty kilometres away, raised by the very people who took her away from them, and that you probably passed her in the street more than once.

There’s nothing else for it; I’m going to visit them in person. I’m going to take my first edition copy of Oliver Twist, along with all the other classic books I’ve been in love with since I was a child. That should at least get them curious enough to let me in the door.

My mother was none too pleased when I told her about it, even threatened to go to the police, but I soon put a stop to that by showing her that I was an adult and that she needed to butt out of my life.

I’ve never found it difficult to deal with my mother – all that’s required is a firm hand.