“I found my mother,” Louise says excitedly as she cuts into her eggs, the rich yolk seeping out to surround her sausage links.

“Nice. Who is she?” I ask.

“Yumi Nakamura. You’re never going to guess what she does for a living.”

“Doctor?” I guess.

“Lawyer?” Evan ventures with his mouth full of waffles.

“Rich housewife!” Marc declares confidently.

“Doctor was closest,” Louise says. “She teaches medicine at Johns Hopkins. Specializes in neuroscience! Can you believe it? I had actually already read some of her papers!”

“So have you talked to her yet?” I ask.

“Just emails so far,” she says, smearing jam on her toast. “She’s got a family and she’s a little worried that having another daughter come out of nowhere might freak her kids out, so we’re taking it slow. But she’s super nice and really smart.”

“Of course she is,” I say. “She’d have to be to produce you.”

Louise smiles as she flips some hashbrowns in my direction with her fork. I catch them with my bots before they land and float them back down in a neat pile by her plate.

“Not kidding. You’re super nice. One of my fifty nicest sisters, easily.”

“You bet I am,” Louise says without a hint of sarcasm. “Now shut up and listen to my mom’s story.”

I make a zipping gesture across my mouth and she proceeds.

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“Her family came over as immigrants from Japan when she was seven, she and her four little brothers and their parents. They all worked in a sushi joint in Vegas run by her uncle. She grew up sweeping floors and studying hard. She had the grades and test scores to get into any school she wanted, but she couldn’t get financial aid because she and her parents were undocumented. One of those visa overstay situations.”

She pauses to drink some orange juice.

“But the fall after she graduated from high school, she saw the ad from the Butler Institute. One of the first batch of them. She applied and was accepted, and ten months later I was born. She paid for herself and all her brothers to go to Ivy League schools and had enough left over to hire some really good lawyers and get her whole family legal residence. It was her experiences while she stayed on campus—which was just the brand new Residence back then—that inspired her career choice. Studying the brain has been her passion ever since. She set a new record as the youngest professor at the medical school.”

“Smart and nice!” I declare.

“Of course, just like me,” she says, flicking more hashbrowns my way.

“I’ve still just got a name for my mother,” Evan says, his eyes downcast. “The contact info in the file was a dead end, she hadn’t lived there for fifteen years.”

“Mine is German,” Marc says. “She’s an environmental activist. We talk every few days. She’s awesome.”

“Cool. How did I not know that yet?” I ask.

“You did know that,” he says. “I’ve told you like six times. You keep pretending you don’t know.”

I laugh, pretending it was a joke. I guess I need to write down Marc’s ramblings better. I usually just try to get the important things down. He laughs along.

“Like you’d forget something like that,” Marc says. “You’re hilarious, Noah.”

Louise rolls her eyes a little. She thinks that we should let more of the sibs know about my condition, but as long as I can fake humanity, I’d rather not.

“Yeah, Noah’s almost as funny as I am nice.”

“You want to use the legal team to track your mom down, Evan?” I ask, happy to change the subject.

“Yeah, can we?” he asks, his eyes getting a glimmer of hope.

“Of course we can.” I’m a little surprised that he didn’t think of that, but I guess I spend a lot more time with the lawyers and have a better idea of the scope of what they can do than he does. “There’s got to be some paper trail for her somewhere. We’ll find her.”

“Thanks, brother,” he says. “I hope so.”