…isn’t true. I found your letters. I think he’s been lied to, and I think you should know who’s been lying.”
Her name was Sofia. She asked me to meet her at a coffee shop halfway between our towns. She was nervous, holding a manila envelope in both hands.
“Six months ago,” she said, “a woman contacted Matt on Facebook. She said she was his biological mother. Her name is Debra. She told him you’d stolen him from her when he was a baby. That she’d been young and struggling, and you’d convinced social services to take him, so you could have a child of your own.”
I couldn’t breathe.
My son, Matt, is adopted. I’ve never hidden that from him. I adopted him from foster care when he was two. His birth mother’s rights had been terminated by a court after he was found alone in an apartment for three days. I’d told him, gently, when he was ten, that his first mother had been very sick and couldn’t take care of him. I never told him the details. I didn’t want him to carry them.
“He believed her,” Sofia said. “He stopped talking to you. He told me you’d died, because he said it was easier than explaining. Debra’s been asking him for money. He’s given her almost eight thousand dollars.”
She slid the envelope across the table. “I found these in his closet. He doesn’t know I opened them.”
Inside were my letters. Every letter I’d written him in the last six months. Unopened. And a printed copy of an email from Debra: “Don’t let her come to the wedding. She’ll ruin everything. I’ll be there instead. As your real mother.”
I went home and found the box I’d kept for twenty-six years. The court documents from his adoption. His foster care records. The newspaper clipping from the day police found him. The judge’s decision.
I mailed copies to Sofia. She gave them to Matt a week before the wedding.
He called me that night. He didn’t say hello. He was crying so hard I could barely understand him. “Mom,” he said. “She left me alone. For three days. I was two.”
“I know, baby,” I said. “I know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you were two,” I said. “I didn’t want you to carry that. I wanted you to just have a mom who showed up.”
He came to my house the next morning. He sat at my kitchen table and read every one of the letters he hadn’t opened. He apologized for the invitation. For the note. For telling his fiancée I was dead. He said Debra had convinced him he’d been taken from someone who loved him. He hadn’t known how to hold both of us.
Debra didn’t come to the wedding. Matt blocked her the day he read the court records.
I did. Front row, on the groom’s side, with a corsage Sofia picked out for me. During the mother-son dance, Matt held me tighter than he had since he was a little boy.
“Thanks for showing up,” he whispered.
“I always do,” I said.
