I grew up knowing I was adopted. My parents never hid it from me. They told me they found me through the foster system when I was just a few months old, but the details were always vague. I didn’t push too hard—I had a good life, a loving home. But still, there were nights I lay awake wondering where I came from. Who left me? Who found me?

Then, a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday, my mom sat me down with an old newspaper clipping.The headline read: “Officer Rescues Infant from Abandoned House.”

She told me the man in the picture was the one who found me. A white police officer named Michael Rayburn, responding to a call about a vacant house in a rough part of town. He went in expecting squatters or drugs. Instead, he found a baby—me—wrapped in a dirty towel on the floor, barely making a sound.

My mom said he held me for over an hour at the hospital, refusing to let me go until they promised I’d be taken care of. She told me he checked in on me for months after, making sure I was safe.And now—after all these years—he wanted to meet me.

I stared at his picture, a man with tired eyes and a heavy expression, holding something so small in his arms. I didn’t know what to feel.