Most people never have to think about their name. They might not like it, they might shorten it or joke about it, but they never question whether it belongs to them. A name gets so attached to who you are that it feels permanent.

Mine wasn't.

I was taken when I was two years old, which means I have no memory of it. I don't remember leaving my father. I don't remember arriving somewhere else. I don't remember anyone deciding that the name I was born with would be replaced with another one. By the time I was old enough to understand what a last name was, the change had already happened and the story had already been rewritten. My teachers used one name, every report card and doctor visit used one name, and eventually I used it too, because I had no reason not to.

The strange thing about something happening that early is that it doesn't feel like a lie. A lie suggests there's another version of the truth standing next to it. I didn't have that. I didn't know there was another father. I didn't know there was another name. I grew up inside the version of events that was handed to me and accepted it the way children accept everything they're told.

It took me most of my life to use the right word for what happened. Kidnapping. It doesn't sit easy in the same sentence as the word mother, and for decades I wouldn't use it. So let me be exact about what I mean. By today's standards, what happened to me would be called kidnapping, period. In the seventies, it didn't even get a second look. There was no court. No adoption. No legal transfer of any kind. My father never signed a thing, because he was never asked, never found, never told. The paperwork that's supposed to exist for something like that doesn't exist anywhere. I was never adopted by my stepfather. Not then, not ever.

The part I still can't fully explain is how easy it was. My mother and stepfather simply enrolled me in school under a new last name, and the school wrote it down. No judge, no filing, nothing. Years later the DMV printed that same name on my driver's license. Diplomas, licenses, jobs, marriages, mortgages, my whole life's paperwork got stacked on top of a name that had no legal document under it, and not one office ever asked for proof. That's how the seventies worked. Records didn't talk to each other, a school took a mother at her word, and a boy could be renamed as easily as a form could be filled out. Meanwhile, my father and his brother drove thousands of miles looking for a boy whose name no longer matched any file. A boy with a brand-new name might as well be a boy who never existed. Writing this book is what finally made me stop softening the word. Lay those facts in a row and read them back. They only spell one thing.