For as long as I could remember, I believed I was adopted. My dad told me when I was three, saying my birth parents couldn’t care for me and that he and Mom had given me a better life. After Mom died in a car accident, it was just the two of us.

Growing up, Dad sometimes made offhand remarks about my “real parents.” On my sixth birthday, he told guests at a barbecue I was adopted. That comment stayed with me. Each year, he’d take me to the local orphanage and say, “See how lucky you are?” I never questioned it.

At sixteen, I saw what looked like adoption papers, but they raised no red flags. It wasn’t until years later, with the encouragement of my partner Matt, that I visited the orphanage myself. But they had no record of me.