And for twenty years, all I had ever told the girls was that they were adopted—never the rest.
“Where did you find this?” I asked, panicked.
“The attic,” Angela replied flatly. “We were looking for old photo albums. Found an envelope addressed to you. We thought maybe it was something we should know.”
She took the phone back. “Turns out we were right.”
“Angela… Nika…”
“Don’t,” Nika warned. “Just don’t.”
The boxes kept moving. The truck kept filling. And I stood there in the rain, searching for words to explain something I had buried two decades ago.
To understand why they were loading my life into boxes, you have to go back twenty years, to the night I met their mother.
I was a young midwife, terrified during my first solo delivery, trying to keep my hands steady. The mother was barely more than a girl herself, maybe seventeen or eighteen.
She labored for hours, growing weaker with each passing minute. At one point, she grabbed my wrist so tightly I can still remember the pressure of her fingers.
