FORT WORTH, Texas — As the recording studio producer at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, Raymond Turner is always focused on what he hears.
That may help explain why he never saw the woman who’d been walking past his studio for the past seven years.
“I had never seen and obviously never met her before,” Turner said. “There was no familiarity at all.”
Christina Sadberry passed Turner’s office every time she brought her son to Cook Children’s for treatment. She says, during those seven years, she never noticed Turner either.
However, she spotted him for the first time on the final day of her son’s final treatment.
“That was the only time we’d ever seen anybody sitting in there and then we just left and went about our business until a few hours later,” Sadberry said.
The same day she first saw Turner, Sadberry got a message on Facebook from Turner’s wife.
A few months earlier Turner had taken a DNA test. He wanted to know what part of Africa his ancestors came from, but the results gave him an unexpected surprise.
“I told my wife, ‘this is wrong. They got it wrong. 23andme is wrong. This doesn’t make any sense at all,’” Turner said.
The DNA test said Turner had a sister, a sister he had no idea existed and it said her name was Christina Sadberry.
“I was like, ‘you’ve got to be kidding me,’” Sadberry said. “There’s no way in the world this was the guy that we saw.”
After unknowingly passing her brother’s studio for seven years and being just steps apart, Sadberry met Turner for the first time in March.
She says she knew she was adopted at three months, but never knew anything more than that. She had taken a DNA test a few years before Turner, trying to find her birth family. Her test didn’t reveal much until Turner took his test.
When they hugged, Sadberry said it felt like home.
Sadberry and her family moved to Florida this summer, but she and Turner plan to spend the holidays together and as much time as possible catching up.
“I feel a lot more complete than I did before,” she said. “And I never knew that I wasn’t complete.”
“Almost as if your heart knew that there was another part of you out there somewhere,” Turner said. “It was a gift that was supposed to happen when it happened. And it’s just part of our story.”
And now, part of their heart’s song.