Adoption secrets. What came next was far from what I had imagined.

When it comes to adoptees searching for their birth parents, there doesn’t seem to be much in between.

You either feel pulled toward the truth, or you don’t. For me, that pull has always been strong.

In California, where I was born, no system exists to help adoptees or birth parents reconnect. For fifty years, I’ve pursued every lead, no matter how faint. And now, at the point where my adoption, George’s adoption, my mother’s death, and the Cascinai family history converge, the story twists into turns I could never have imagined. My investigation has drawn on a wide range of sources: correspondence from my aunt Dorothy and my father, records from a mortuary, the Arizona Board of Medical Examiners, and Bio-Laboratories; documents from cemeteries, coroners, and attorneys; files from the Department of Social Services and the Department of Social Welfare; letters from my grandfather; and official records from the San Bernardino County Recorder, Sheriff’s Department, Police Department, and vital records offices.

Years of digging through Ancestry finally led me to an older sister—someone who held fragments of a truth I had chased for decades. The Department of Social Services swore I was my mother’s only child. That was only the first lie. I have a stepbrother, too. Whether more relatives exist no longer matters.

I tracked down neighbors from San Bernardino who remembered my father, my mother, George, and me at 1034 Pumalo Street.

What matters are the secrets—buried deep, hidden in plain sight, and guarded by those who swore they’d never be found. And I will open every door…even if the last one leaves me standing in the ruins of everything I thought was my life.

Disturbing people with the truths I’m unearthing is no longer my concern. If the path leads to a nightmare, then I’ll face it. Indifference has become my armor.

This decade of my 70s is a journey inward—an honest reckoning with who I am and what truly matters to me.

The investigation isn’t finished. I will continue to search, learn, and write.

But the deeper I dig, the clearer it becomes—every answer only leads to another locked door.

And the next one I open may reveal a truth that can never be forgotten.