…went home with you.”
I stared at the two birth certificates. Two baby girls. Same mother: me. Same father: my husband, Paul. Born nine minutes apart.
I’d had twins. Nobody had ever told me.
I’d been in intensive care for a week after the birth, heavily sedated. The second baby, the administrator explained, had been born with a serious heart defect and was transferred to a children’s hospital two hundred miles away. The records showed she survived surgery.
And then she’d been placed for adoption, with my husband’s signature on the consent form.
I drove home and put the papers in front of Paul. He broke down. His mother, Margaret, had told him we couldn’t afford two babies, one of them sick. She’d found a family through her church who wanted a child and could pay for her medical care. Paul was twenty-three and terrified. He signed. Then he spent eighteen years pretending it never happened.
“The baby wasn’t hers anyway,” his mother had written. In her mind, giving my daughter away made her someone else’s.
I found her through the adoption agency three months later. Her name is Grace. She’s a nursing student in Ohio. She’d always known she was adopted. She’d always wondered why.
We met at a coffee shop. Grace and my daughter Ella sat across from each other, staring. Same eyes. Same laugh. Same habit of tucking their hair behind their left ear.
I’m still married to Paul. I don’t know if I’ll stay. His mother and I no longer speak. But this summer, both my daughters came on vacation with me. I paid for it myself.
