Summary

Walking home from physical therapy one day, Joan feels both her physical and cognitive confidence vanishing. She asks herself what she is really afraid of when she writes about being afraid to get up out of her chair in the rehearsal room. Joan has been told that all adopted children "fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to have been abandoned by their natural" (118). Joan, as an adoptive parent, believes all adoptive parents fear "that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them" (119). Although Joan knows adoption is hard to get right, she and John never questioned being honest with Quintana or writing about their family structure.

Thirty-two years after Quintana's adoption, she gets a letter from a biological sister who has tracked her down after recently...