Chapter 3 — WHAT I THOUGHT IT MEANT

I did not go to the deposition.

I sat in my car in the garage under Wacker for fifty minutes and I built the wrong story, and I want to lay out how I built it, because it was a good story and it was the obvious one and every single person I have told this to since has built the same one inside about four seconds.

I thought: there is another branch.

I thought: my grandmother had a sister, or my grandfather had a first family, or there is a child somebody did not talk about in 1968, and my mother knows, and this woman on the flower cart is my cousin, and the two rings were made for two sisters who stopped speaking.

That is a story about a secret.

It is a story where I am still a Rosewood at the end of it.

It did not occur to me — not that day, not for eleven weeks — that the question was not *how is this woman related to me*.

The question was *what makes me think I am related to this ring*.

Here is the story I had.

My mother is Dorothy Rosewood.

She is eighty-one, she lives in a two-bedroom on Sheridan with a view of about four feet of lake between two other buildings, and she has all her marbles and has never once let anybody forget it.

She married a man named Frank Keane in 1976 and he left in 1981 and I have three memories of him.

I was born Adele Keane.

The story was that my mother's people were Rosewoods — that her mother, my grandmother, was a Rosewood before she married, that there had been money at some point and a house in Kenwood and a family that mattered, and that the name went out of use the way names do when the daughters marry.

The ring was the proof.

The ring came to me on the eleventh of May 1997, three weeks before I graduated, in a small box, from my mother's hand, in her kitchen.

She said, "This was your grandmother's. It has the family name inside it. You are the last one who can carry it."

I was nineteen.

I want to be honest about what happened in me at nineteen when a woman I loved put a heavy gold ring in my hand and told me I came from somewhere.

I did not investigate.

I did not ask which grandmother, or when, or from whom, or why I had never seen it in the eighteen years before that.

I changed my name to Rosewood four months later, at the Daley Center, on a form that cost me thirty-one dollars, and I have practised under it since 2003, and my firm is called Rosewood Partners, and my daughter's passport says Nell Rosewood, and I have raised sixty-one million dollars under that word for a foundation with that word in its name.

And my job — my actual professional specialty, the thing I am hired to do — is to look at an object and a name and a date and work out who it truly belongs to.

I have done it for other people six hundred and some times.

I did not do it once for myself in twenty-nine years, because I did not want the answer, and a person can not-want an answer so thoroughly that they never even locate the question.