My biological mother left me before I was old enough to remember her. That fact followed me quietly through every stage of my life, like a shadow that never completely disappeared. I never knew her face or her voice. Everything I learned about my beginning came from paperwork, careful explanations, and conversations that stopped when adults thought I wasn’t paying attention.
I was left at a small hospital on a freezing morning in November. No letter. No name. Just a newborn wrapped in a thin blanket. Social services stepped in, and a few months later I was placed with the two people who would become my real parents in every sense of the word: Grace and Leonard.
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