…your sister’s. And I adopted her. The baby is my daughter. Your husband’s sister, Emily.”
I sat down hard in her kitchen chair.
My younger sister, Kate, disappeared when she was seventeen and I was nineteen. My parents said she’d run away with a boyfriend. They never looked for her. I spent twenty-four years wondering where she was.
My mother-in-law, Margaret, told me the truth that night. Kate had been pregnant. My parents were furious and ashamed. They sent her to a home for unwed mothers in another state. I’d driven her to the hospital the night she went into labor. That was the photo: me, holding my niece for the first and only time, before my parents took her away. I’d blocked that night out of my memory for years.
Margaret had adopted the baby through a church agency. Years later, when her son brought me home, she recognized my last name and my face from the adoption papers. She’d been terrified ever since that I would find out and “take Emily away.”
“So you tried to turn my children against me,” I said.
“I thought if your husband stopped trusting you, you’d leave,” she whispered. “And the secret would leave with you.”
Emily was twenty-four. She knew she was adopted. She’d never known her birth mother’s name.
I told my husband and Emily together. Emily cried. Then she took a DNA test. It connected her to a woman named Katherine Moore in Oregon. My sister.
Kate is forty-one now. She’s married with two sons. She’d spent her whole adult life believing no one in our family wanted to find her. Last summer, she flew in and met her daughter for the first time since the day she was born. I drove them both to dinner. Margaret wasn’t invited.
