Ransom investigates his parents' adoption

Ransom’s investigation turns a bargain made for a high-school reunion into a search through the records of his own childhood. By using Bethany’s authorized access to her employer’s adoption databases, he moves from knowing only that he was adopted to recovering his birth name and the names of his birth parents—a paper trail that reconnects the identity he was given as a child with the family history withheld by a closed adoption.

Motive and the bargain

Ransom arrives in town under the cover of a personal research project, but initially conceals from Bethany that the subject is himself. He has reached a dead end through ordinary means and hopes first to find useful information at his parents’ home. Bethany’s agency may hold more complete records, however, so he offers to act as her boyfriend—or even her husband—for the reunion weekend in exchange for secure access to its files. The arrangement links the performance of romance to a private search: Bethany wants a convincing partner for her classmates, while Ransom wants the information that may explain his origins.

The exchange is not a simple cash transaction. Ransom argues that money would make little difference to him and proposes access to information as the alternative. Bethany asks what he wants the files for, but he keeps the purpose to himself. He presents his work as a project and does not tell her that he has been trying for years to identify his birth parents. The concealed motive gives the deal an ethical tension: Bethany agrees to provide access without knowing the personal stakes that make the records so important to him.

Their cover relationship supplies the practical setting for his research. At the reunion, Ransom presents himself as Bethany’s arm candy and makes a joke about the midnight food she gets in return; Bethany supports the fiction by describing him as a chef and caterer. Later, when they check into a hotel, he chooses a single king-sized bed because separate beds would invite questions from her classmates. The staged intimacy keeps their explanation plausible, even as Ransom privately regards the social performance as tiring and looks ahead to the agency information that could make the weekend worthwhile.

Why ordinary searches fail

Ransom already knows that his parents adopted a child, but he knows nothing else about the adoption. It took place about twenty years earlier, when the child was a minor, and the identifying information about that child is separated from the adoptive parents’ dossiers. That separation is not a minor inconvenience: it leaves Ransom unable to connect the people who raised him to the record of the child they adopted without access to the agency’s more sensitive files.

His usual public-record searches have not solved the problem. Because the adoption was closed, he cannot obtain the information he needs through those searches. The state’s role in the transfer from birth parents to the organization was limited, and Ransom does not know which name to search. A family-court clerk has also warned that the paperwork may have been destroyed after so much time, while the more relevant documents are likely held by the agency. The investigation therefore depends on the records Bethany can reach, not on a readily available public file.

Searching the agency records

Bethany eventually gives Ransom credentials for two separate systems: one for adopted children and another for parents who relinquished children. She makes the limits explicit. The first login opens only the adopted-children database; the second is valid only for the birth-parents records. She warns him not to try the credentials elsewhere because doing so could lock her out and force her to explain. She also directs him to use her laptop, since the agency recognizes that device as authorized. Ransom promises that he is looking only for the information he needs.

Once Bethany leaves for the luau, he retrieves her laptop from her luggage, enters her personal password, and opens the first system, Children Served by Us. He hesitates over what name to search: the record could be filed under his adoptive name or under a name from before the adoption, and he does not know the latter. He settles on Patrick Nolan, a name he stopped using at least five years earlier. The search first returns no results, then reveals one match. That brief delay turns the database from a possible dead end into a route back to his childhood.

The file contains a photograph of him at three years old and names Janice and Raymond Nolan as his adoptive parents. It records that he entered the agency at age two after being given up by his birth parents. Ransom also reads that he was assessed as having above-average intelligence for his age and diagnosed with minor behavioral issues described as consistent with an unstable attachment to birth parents. The file contains records of an interview between the agency, the child, and his new parents; reading his own answers from childhood makes him feel like a voyeur. Yet the document does not name his birth parents, so the first discovery confirms the route of his adoption without completing the search.

Names recovered and significance

Attached files supply the missing link in the first database: Ransom’s birth name was Patrick Cartwright. That name lets him move from the adopted-child record to the second system. There he searches among roughly half a dozen people named Cartwright until he finds the entries associated with his birth name. The records identify Genevieve Cartwright and Alexander Cartwright. After years of trying to find at least one of his birth parents, he now has both names. Relief gives way to a quiet pause as he closes his eyes and takes in the realization that the missing piece has finally appeared.

Ransom writes down the names and their information, closes the two agency databases, and begins searching other records sites he has used in past jobs. The action ends not with a complete account of his birth parents, but with a crucial change in what he can know: he now has a birth identity and two names from which to continue. The records perform several different functions at once. They document his placement with Janice and Raymond Nolan, preserve a childhood assessment, and expose the limits created by keeping the child’s file separate from the birth parents’ information. For Ransom, moving between those files is both an information search and an effort to reconnect the identities that the closed adoption’s paperwork had kept apart.