A four-year-old child lands in Chicago, having been flown from Athens in the care of her adoptive mother. As a grown woman, she cannot remember anything of these early years, yet they continue to haunt her into the present day.

A young woman recalls how as a child she found solace in Greek mythology whose stories felt more real to her than those that circulated in the household of her adoptive U.S. family.

A child is placed in a box outside the orphanage in Patras, Greece, in May 1953, only to be adopted three years later by a married couple living in San Diego. In turn, the couple would adopt three more children, among them a boy from an orphanage in Athens. Facing nightly abuse from her adoptive father for repeated bedwetting that continued until she was twelve years old, the girl fantasizes about her birth father, thinking to herself, “My real dad would never treat me this way.”

For another adoptee, the story of unsettlement and dislocation would begin with her being left at the same orphanage in Patras, a note attached to her infant body reading, “Her name is Despo. She was born 1/5/1958. She likes to eat.”

A thirteen-year-old boy on a car ride with his father and uncle recognizes without understanding why that he is not related by blood to the people in the car with him, that he is somehow a “fraud,” without a family line he can call his own.

A twelve-year-old boy growing up in the shadow of Disneyland is completing a registration form for junior high school and realizes he doesn’t know the answer to the question, “What is your city of birth?” In the conversation that occurs with his parents, his father tells him, “You were adopted, we told you before.” As he would remember years later, he couldn’t at that moment fathom the reason anyone would want to give their child away.

Twenty-five years after being forced to give her son up for adoption, a Greek woman writes to her now-grown son a letter that will change both their lives.