CHAPTER 8: That’s Your Mom

John stays up nearly five hours—until predawn Thursday, February 22, 2018—to respond with a mangled, meandering, and occasionally disturbing 2,500-word email. Edie learns about the phonetic spelling Por-shay from John, who requests discretion, as Fran might not be the one. The hearing-impaired pacifist was fragged in Vietnam, years after serving as a teenage missionary in 1964 British Guyana, we discover.

That same Thursday, Edie and Beth resume their search for Fran, which kicks into high gear once Beth realizes she hasn’t searched for the name Portier. Minutes later, Frances Portier, a 1965 graduate of a Baton Rouge high school, sure as hell looks like she could be Edie's birth mother. Patrick flatly tells his baby sister, "That’s your Mom." With the help of Fran’s photo-filled Facebook profile, Beth and Edie soon create a potential narrative of how the pregnancy, birth, and adoption went down. It’s made even more plausible by a dearth of Fran pics from the time she would’ve been showing a baby bump, which happened to coincide with Fran and her mother "touring Europe" for most of 1970.

Get your signed edition of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery at LittleGirlBook.com. Follow The Little Girl on social media @littlegirlbook. Subscribe to The Little Girl Book Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Audio editing and production by Michael Thibodeaux and the Rep Cap team