SYNOPSIS: Handed over along a Texas hospital curb in 1970, no judge, agency, or paperwork required, I am one of 9000 infants sold on the black market that year alone. I am a black-market baby.

At 12 I learned my birth certificate did not exist, at 13 I used fake papers, and by 18, a single mom myself, I discovered I’d never actually been adopted. My new parents spent their lives looking over their shoulders, all because they bought a baby, no judge or paperwork involved.

First denied by adoption agencies, then extorted by the attorney they hired to skirt the system, they had to choose: go to the police or pay up. They paid upwards of 30K and hid in plain sight with me, their paperless child. Fear, abuse, and addiction followed. At 12, I learned my birth certificate didn’t exist, and my parents didn’t know my birthday. At 13, I used fake papers. And by 18, my own unexpected pregnancy led me to discover I’d never been adopted. At 38, still needing a birth certificate, and spurred by a prophetic dream message after my abusive mother’s death, I journey to unearth the lifelong threat that drove her alcoholism and ballooned my crippled father to 650 pounds — at any moment, someone could have returned for the baby.

Seeking atonement, my mother’s ghost hovers and helps as I race to untangle decades of deception, track down the dirty attorney responsible, and find my birth mother. But to regain my true identity, I must put my mother’s ghost to rest and convince my very alive birth mother to divulge the name of my birth father, the man she says raped her decades ago. Yet, who should I believe? And what will it cost me?

In light of the Dobb’s decision, and the positioning of adoption as the solution to unexpected pregnancy, this memoir shines a light on the cracks in the still-broken 30-billion-dollar for-profit adoption industry. It is also a healing testimony to the resilience of one bartered baby who refused to be erased.

With themes of identity, family dysfunction, addiction, abuse, and resilience, this memoir will appeal to fans of Gretchen Sisson’s RELINQUISHED, Jeanette Wall’s THE GLASS CASTLE, Tara Westover’s EDUCATED, and the play/movie THE WHALE by Samuel D. Hunter.