I didn’t even know her name until recently.”
That distinction mattered eventually.
At that moment, it only made me angrier.
Daniel told me he had been eighteen when his girlfriend became pregnant.
Neither of them had money.
Neither had finished school.
Their families had panicked, argued, blamed, pressured and finally arranged a private adoption.
Daniel signed the papers.
He said he had convinced himself that signing them meant the story was finished.
“I was a kid,” he said.
“Not legally.
I know that.
But in every way that mattered, I was terrified.
I told myself she would have a better life without me.”
“And then you never told your wife she existed.”
He stared at the floor.
“No.”
I pushed the photograph back toward him.
“How did she find you?”
Daniel reached into the envelope and removed the smaller letter.
“This came six weeks ago.”
I stared at him.
Six weeks.
Not years ago.
Not before our marriage.
Six weeks ago, while I had been packing school lunches and paying the electric bill and asking why he seemed distracted at dinner, my husband had received a letter from a daughter I didn’t know existed.
“You’ve had this for six weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In my desk at the office at first.
Then in the car.”
“So every day for six weeks, you came home and decided not to tell me.”
“Yes.”
There are moments when someone’s honesty is almost more painful than another lie.
That was one of them.
I opened Anna’s letter.
Her words were careful.
She wrote that she had always known she was adopted.
She had recently obtained enough information to locate Daniel and had spent months deciding whether contacting him was fair.
She didn’t want money.
She wasn’t looking for a replacement father.
She wanted medical history, answers and, if Daniel was willing, one conversation.
Near the end she had written that she had no intention of disrupting his family.
That sentence broke something in me.
Not because Anna had done anything wrong.
Because a stranger knew about my family while I knew nothing about her.
“You answered her.”
Daniel nodded.
“The next day.”
“And Friday?”
“I met her.”
My fingers tightened around the letter.
“Where?”
“A café about an hour away.
She didn’t want to meet near here.
She was afraid someone would recognize me or that she’d accidentally walk into our lives before we were ready.”
