“You thought this would make me love you less,” I said slowly, working through it out loud. “That’s why you hid it for two years.”
“Wouldn’t you have wondered?” Wren asked, her voice cracking. “If you’d read that the day it arrived — wouldn’t some part of you have looked at us differently, even just a little?”
⸻
I thought about that question honestly before I answered it, because I owed them an honest answer, not just a comforting one.
“I don’t think so,” I finally said. “But I understand why you were scared enough not to take that chance.”
“We were eighteen,” Nora said. “We’d just found out our whole existence started because of something Mom was ashamed enough of to run from her own kids. We didn’t know how to hand that to you and still be sure you’d stay.”
“I’ve never once stayed because of biology,” I said. “I stayed because three babies were crying down that hallway, and nobody else was coming. That’s the whole reason. It was true the day I signed those adoption papers, and it’s still true right now, sitting at this table.”
