So I tried something else entirely. I had been curious about plant medicine for years, and a friend referred me to a couple who held ayahuasca ceremonies in the hinterland of Queensland. The ceremony was held in a beautiful octagonal room surrounded by bushland, with candles on an altar and the sounds of the forest pressing softly against the windows.
I won’t pretend it was a transcendent experience. I felt nauseous and uncomfortable for most of the night. But somewhere in the early hours, something settled. Not an answer. Not a vision. Just a quiet, steady knowing that had been there all along.
You already know what to do. You have always known. Stop asking everyone else.
I flew over 9,000 miles to have the conversation no one wanted me to have.
Brisbane to Fiji. Fiji to Vancouver, where I gave myself two days to breathe and walk beside the water. Vancouver to Miami, where an old friend reminded me I was loved regardless of how any of this unfolded. Then to my sisters in a suburb outside Miami, who didn’t agree with my decision but held me anyway. And finally, two short flights into the mountains of West Virginia, where my dad was waiting at a tiny airport — quiet, reliable, exactly as he had always been.
The drive to his house took an hour. We talked about the weather, about nothing, while everything sat between us.
I had chosen to tell him on Mother’s Day, the same day my Aunt Kathy was murdered. The day that had fractured our family before I was even born. It felt right to reclaim it.
We sat at his kitchen table in the same home where my mother had taken her last breaths in a hospice bed years earlier. I looked at his face, and I said it.
“Speaking of family, I found out some pretty shocking news on Ancestry.com a few months ago.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Did your mother tell you anything?” he said quietly.
“No,” I said.
“I know something,” he said. “But I haven’t talked about it in 30 years.”
He had known. Not everything — but enough.
When I was very young, someone had sent him a typed anonymous letter. No return address. Just a single paragraph on a plain piece of paper:
You are being played as a fool. Your wife has been fooling around and Katie is not your daughter.
He had confronted my mother. She had looked him in the eye and told him the letter was a lie. That people were crazy. She’s your daughter. Who are you going to believe? And every time he raised it after that, she would disappear for days. The fighting was relentless. So eventually, he did what so many people do when the truth costs too much to keep pursuing.
He stopped asking.
He kept the letter hidden in an envelope on top of the insulation in the basement for years. Then one day, not wanting anyone to find it, he burned it.
“I wanted to tell you hundreds of times,” he said, his voice breaking. “But I didn’t know how you’d take it. And then your mother was gone and I thought — maybe she told her. Maybe she didn’t.”
“Is this a relief?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “Yeah, it’s a relief,” he said. “Because I’ve been fighting with myself about it for years. I was going to put it in the will.”
I think about that anonymous letter sometimes. Someone knew the truth and chose to speak it — even anonymously, even imperfectly. It still wasn’t enough to break through the wall my mother had built around it.
But the truth has a way of persisting. It finds cracks. It waits.
What we don’t speak, we store. In our bodies. In our nervous systems. In the fathers who burn letters in basements. In the daughters who shake their heads so hard their earrings jingle, insisting it can’t be true.
I didn’t take that DNA test looking for any of this. But the truth wasn’t waiting for me to look. It was just waiting for me to be ready.
Katie Delimon is a trauma-informed coach, keynote speaker, podcast host of “Inner Self-Confidence” and author of the bestselling memoir “Trust the Flames.” For more, visit www.katiedelimon.com or follow her on Instagram.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost in May 2026.