***
Paige was sitting on the floor of her bedroom with her back against the bed and her birth certificate in her lap.
She had found it in the fireproof box in the back of her parents' closet and read it four times on the closet floor among her father's work boots. Certificate of Live Birth. State of Wisconsin. Name of Child: Paige Elizabeth Doyle. Date of Birth: December 9, 2008. Place of Birth: St. Joseph's Hospital, Chippewa Falls. Father: Russell James Doyle. Mother: Dana Marie Doyle.
It looked so real. That was the thing. It had a raised seal you could feel with your thumb. It had the state registrar's signature in blue ink.
At the very bottom, in tiny type, there was a line she had never noticed before, not at the DMV, not when her mother had handed it to her in a manila envelope and said, Don't lose this, it's important. Amended record. A date. A file number.
Amended.
She had looked it up on her phone, sitting there on the floor. It took eleven seconds. When a child is adopted in Wisconsin, the state issues a new birth certificate. The new certificate lists the adoptive parent as the parent. The original is sealed.
The original is sealed. Somewhere, in some building in Madison, in some drawer, there was a piece of paper with another name on it. A name that had been embroidered in green thread inside a coat she had put on to hurt a thirteen-year-old.
There was a knock on her door.
"Go away," Paige said.
"It's me."
The kid. Paige closed her eyes.
"Go away, Lucy."
There was a pause on the other side of the door. Then Lucy's voice came again, smaller, but not going away. "You said my name."
Paige opened her eyes. She hadn't noticed. She had spent eleven months not saying it. The kid. Her. Your father's other one. She had made a sort of game of it, at first, a game to show her mother whose side she was on, and then it had just become a habit, the way it becomes a habit not to step on a certain stair because it creaks.