Intro

Her name was Beryl Jean Taylor. She raised me.

She was not my mother.

In February 2017, I had dinner with my uncle at a restaurant in Arizona. I did not ask him anything that night. I went home, and Heather told me I should ask him, and I said, “What would be the point? "

A few days later, after he had already driven back to Utah, I texted him.

I did not ask him who my mother was. I asked him about a lie. There was a story I had grown up hearing and been told was a lie, that a woman I called my half-sister was actually my mother, and I asked my uncle whether there was anything in it.

He wrote back and told me yes. Susan was my mother.

I was forty years old. I had a wife, two children, a trade, a house and a name, and I sat there with my phone in my hand and lost it completely. I cried and could not stop.

There is a second thing in this book, and I did not go looking for it. I found it while I was looking for my mother, and by the time I understood what I had, I could not put it down again.

A little girl died in that house. Her name was Becky, and she was about eight years old, and I could never find her surname. Five people have told me what happened to her, and their accounts agree.

I will come back to her.

This is how I found out about my mother. But before I start, there are three things you need from me, and I will be as quick as I can.

The first is a number.

Annually, the United States reports approximately 800,000 missing children on average. Most of those are runaways, and most come home. Of the ones taken, somebody takes the overwhelming majority the child already trusts: a parent, a grandparent, an aunt. Stranger abductions, the kind that make the news, are a tiny fraction of the total.

Nobody counts the ones that are never reported.

That is the category I belong in. There was no search, no case number, no photograph on a milk carton, no organization formed in my name. A young mother lost a child, and the people who took him were at the funeral, at Christmas, in the family photographs, for the next forty-one years.

When a stranger takes a child, the world mobilizes. When a grandmother does it, there is a casserole and everybody agrees not to mention it.

The second is a piece of technology.

When I was born in 1976, there was no reliable way to prove who a child’s father was. That changed in 1986, when a geneticist called Alec Jeffreys used DNA profiling in a criminal case in England, and again in 1987 when the same technique convicted a man in Florida. Within a few years, it was being used to settle paternity, and it cost thousands of dollars, and you had to know who you were testing against.

Then, like everything else, the price came down. Today a company will mail a kit to your house for a hundred dollars. You spit in the tube, send it back, and six weeks later they reveal your relatives and their relatedness.

I did two of them, and I did them for two reasons.

The first was to prove what I was. My birth certificate said Jean and Martin. Everybody who could contradict it was dead or had spent forty years being called a liar. I needed something that did not depend on anybody in that family agreeing with me, and a cheek swab does not care who your grandmother is.

The second was to find my father. Nobody would give me a name I could rely on. I had a card with a phonetic spelling, a wrong job in the wrong state, and four relatives with four different versions. What I actually needed was to be matched with a stranger and work backward, and that is exactly what happened.

Both tests came back with the same answer.

Everything in this book was possible because of that, and impossible before it. If I had gone looking in 1996 instead of 2016, I would still be looking now.

The third is a word.

I am going to use the word narcissist because it is the word I have and because it is the word that finally made forty years of my life make sense when somebody explained it to me. I am not a doctor. I never examined the woman I am about to describe, and nobody ever diagnosed her with anything. What I can tell you is what she did over sixty years to everyone she ever met. You can call it whatever you like.

But you will follow this book better if you know what the word means, so here is what I was told and what I have watched for myself. Seven things.

One. A sense of self-importance. They are better than you, just because. Everyone around them is a pawn they can use. After using you, they discard you like a worthless, waterlogged book, and you must deal with the fact that they no longer need you.

Two. Entitlement. They believe they are more important and therefore deserve special treatment. They will demand this special treatment even if no one offers it.

Three. Constant admiration. Not affection. Admiration. They need to be told they are good, and they need it in front of other people.

Four. No real empathy. They can perform it. They can say the right words at a funeral and send a card and put a hand on your shoulder, and there is nothing behind it.

Five. They use people. When a person’s purpose concludes, their existence also ends. Children included.

Six. They cannot take criticism of any kind. Ask a straightforward question and you will not get a straightforward answer. You will get an attack, or tears, or a version of the story in which you are the problem.

And seven, which is the one nobody warns you about. They rewrite what happened. Not occasionally. Continuously, and about everything, small things and enormous things, with complete confidence and no hesitation at all. They will tell you something happened when you were standing right there, and it did not, and they will not blink.

The book’s structure results from that last one.

You will notice as you go through it I keep quoting recordings and text messages and court documents rather than simply telling you what people said. There is a reason for that. My upbringing involved someone who altered the past professionally, and by age forty, I distrusted my own memories. So I stopped relying on it. I bought a recorder. I kept every message. I went and got the paperwork.

Readers can check almost everything in this book. Where it cannot, I say so.

One more thing about the book itself, and then I will begin.

I started writing this in 2019. I finished it in 2026.

That is seven years for a book I already had the material for. I had the recordings before I wrote a word. I had the documents. I knew what had happened, and I knew what I wanted to say about it.

What I could not do was sit down and write it.

I would open the file and get a page in and have to stop. Panic attacks. Crying for hours at a desk in my forties over things that happened before I could talk. I would put it away for months at a time and then try again, and the same thing would happen.

I am telling you that at the front because it explains why a book about events in 2017 is being published in 2026, and because somewhere in this there may be a person who has found out something like this about themselves and cannot understand why they are not coping better.

It took me seven years, and I am a grown man with a wife and a trade, and a house.

Nobody gets over it quickly. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

So: a category nobody counts. A test that did not exist when I was born. And a woman who altered the past for a living.

That is everything you need.

This is how I found out.