In February 2017 a man Maximus Sego had known his whole life sent him a text message. It said that his mother was not his mother.
He was forty years old. The woman who raised him was his grandmother, Beryl Jean Taylor. She had taken him at three months old, written her own name on his birth certificate, and never filed an adoption anywhere in the state of Utah. His real mother lived thirty minutes away for thirty-seven years and died in 2013 without ever having been allowed to say out loud that he was her son.
His whole family knew. The two who tried to tell him were called liars.
Over the next two years he found his father with a cheek swab, tracked down an uncle everyone said had died as a boy, and recorded twenty-one phone calls with the people who had been in the room. Almost every page of this book is on tape or on paper.
And there is Becky. An eight-year-old foster child who died in that house at the end of the nineteen seventies, and his brother, who wrote down what he saw:
"When I was five or six years old, I watched my grandparents murder a little girl."
