“What’s over there?” he asked.

“Hang on,” I said. As it turned out, the linen closet was on the opposite side of the wall from the bathroom sink. I opened it and started clearing out everything on the floor below the first shelf-a basket for dirty laundry, a stockpile of toilet paper and tissue boxes-until the wall was clear. I thought, if the pipe could be reached from here, it made more sense to hack through in a place where it wouldn’t be noticed.

Once I had everything out, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled into the closet and listened for the leak.

The baseboard that ran along the inside of the closet looked loose along the back. I touched it, and noticed that it seemed to be fitted into place and not nailed. I got my fingers in behind it, and felt something.

It was the top edge of a letter-sized envelope, which was perfectly shaped to hide behind baseboarding. I worked the envelope out. There was nothing written on it, nor was it sealed, but the flap was tucked in. I opened it, and inside I found a single piece of paper and a key.

I left the key inside and removed the paper, which was folded once, and was an official document of some kind.

It was a “Certificate of Live Birth.”

Jan’s birth certificate. All the details she had never wanted to share with me were on this piece of paper. Of course, I already knew her last name was Richler-rhymes with “tickler”-but she’d gone to great lengths never to speak her parents’ names or even say where they lived.

Now, at a glance, I knew that her mother’s name was Gretchen, that her father’s name was Horace. That she had been born in the Monroe Community Hospital in Rochester. There was an address for a house on Lincoln Avenue.

I committed the details of the document to memory, folded it and put it back into the envelope. I didn’t know what to make of the key. It was a type I didn’t recognize. It didn’t appear to be a house key. I left it in the envelope, and put it back where I’d found it, pushing the baseboard back into place.

By the time I got around the other side of the wall, Dad had already made a hole. “I’m in!” he said. “And there’s your leak right there! You want to turn off the main valve?”

Before the Buffalo trip, I went to the online phone directories and found only five Richlers listed in the Rochester area, and only one of them was an H. Richler.

He was still listed as living on Lincoln Avenue.

That told me at least one of Jan’s parents was still alive, if not both. If Horace Richler was dead, it was possible his wife, Gretchen, had left the listing unchanged.

I made a call from my desk at the Standard in a bid to clear that up. I dialed the Richler number and a woman who sounded as though she could be in her sixties or seventies answered. Gretchen, I was betting.

“Is Mr. Richler there?” I asked.

“Hang on,” she said.

Half a minute later, a man said tiredly, “Hello.”

“Is this Hank Richler?”

“Huh? No. This is Horace Richler.”

“Oh, sorry. I’ve got the wrong number.”

I offered another apology and hung up.

It was hard not to be curious about them when Jan had so steadfastly refused to talk about them.

“I don’t want anything to do with them,” she’d said over the years. “I don’t ever want to see them again, and I don’t imagine they’ll be too destroyed if they never see me.”

Even when Ethan was born, Jan was adamantly opposed to letting her parents know.

“They won’t give a rat’s ass,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said, “knowing that they have a grandchild will change things. Maybe they’ll think it’s time for some sort of reconciliation.”

She shook her head. “Not a chance. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

What I’d learned since first meeting Jan at a jobs placement office when I was interviewing some unemployed people for a story six years ago was that her unnamed father was a miserable son of a bitch, and her mother spent most of her time drunk and depressed.

Jan didn’t like to talk about it. The story of her parents, and her life with them, spilled out in bits and pieces over the years.

“They blamed me for everything,” Jan said one Saturday night two years ago when my parents had taken a very young Ethan for a sleepover. We’d gone through three bottles of wine-a rare event considering that Jan drank very little-and there’d been every indication we were headed upstairs for some long-overdue debauchery. Unexpectedly, Jan began to talk about a part of her life she’d never shared with me.

“What do you mean, they blamed you?” I asked.

“Him, mostly,” Jan said. “For fucking up their lives.”

“What, by being a kid? By existing?”

She looked at me through glassy eyes. “Yeah, pretty much. Dad had a nickname for me. Hindy.”

“Hildy?”

“No. Hindy.”

“Like the language?”

She shook her head, took another sip of wine, and said, “No, with a ‘y.’ Short for ‘Hindenburg.’ Not just because I went through a bit of a pudgy period, but because he thought of me as his own personal little fucking disaster.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yeah, well, that was true love compared to my tenth birthday.”

I was going to ask, but decided to wait.

“He promised to take me to New York to see an actual Broadway musical. I always dreamed of going there. I’d watch the Tonys when they were on TV, saved copies of the Sunday Arts section of The New York Times whenever I found one, looking at all the ads for the shows, memorizing the names of the stars and the reviews. He said he got tickets for Grease. That we were going to take the bus down. That we were going to stay in a hotel. I couldn’t believe it. My father, he’d been so indifferent to me for so long, but I thought maybe, because I was ten…”

She had another sip of wine.

“So it got to be the day that we were supposed to go. I got my bag all packed. I picked out just what I was going to wear to the theater. A red dress and black shoes. And my father, he wasn’t doing anything to get ready. I told him to get moving, and he smiled, and he said, ‘There’s no trip. No bus ride. No hotel. No tickets for Grease. Never was. Disappointment’s a bitch, isn’t it? Now you know how it feels.’”

I was speechless. Jan smiled and said, “Bet you think I caught a lucky break. You’d rather die than sit through Grease.”

I found some words. “How’d you deal with that?”

She said, “I went to another place.”

“Where? Relatives?”

“No, no, you don’t get it,” she said. Jan put her hand to her mouth. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

The next morning she refused to talk about it.

She did tell me, over time, that she left home at seventeen and for nearly twenty years had had no contact with either of her parents. She had no brothers or sisters who might have let her know, whether she wanted to or not, what had happened to her mother and father.

For all she knew, they were both dead.

Except I knew they weren’t, because of the phone call I’d made.

I’d never told Jan about what I’d found behind the baseboard. I didn’t want her to know I’d violated her privacy. I was troubled that she’d gone to such lengths to keep me from knowing about her background, but maybe she was right not to trust me. Finding the birth certificate was leading me to do the very thing she had always wanted to prevent.

Driving back from Buffalo, I took a detour to the north and found the Lincoln Avenue home, and stared at its peeling paint and shutters askew, as if some meaning could be drawn from it all. I wondered whether one of the two second-story windows had been Jan’s bedroom, or if her room had been at the back of the house.

I pictured her as a child, going in and out of that front door, perhaps playing in the front yard. Jumping rope on the sidewalk, playing hopscotch on her driveway. Maybe those images were too idyllic. Perhaps, growing up in a household where love was displaced by anger and resentment, such simple pleasures were elusive. Maybe for Jan, every time she came out that door was like being released from prison. I could picture her running to a friend’s house, returning home only when she had to.