Part 2: Before my husband passed away, he asked me to deliver a sealed letter to a woman I'd never met — after she read the first line, she looked at me and asked, "Did he tell you everything?"

I held her.

For nearly thirty years I had believed that embrace began in a delivery room.

It hadn't.

It had begun later.

Fevers.

School mornings.

Bad haircuts.

Science fairs.

First heartbreak.

College move-in.

Thousands of ordinary days.

Birth is one beginning.

It is not the only one.
CHAPTER 5 — REBECCA LOOKED AT EMILY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWENTY-NINE YEARS AND SAID, “I DIDN’T GIVE YOU AWAY BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT YOU.”

Emily waited six weeks.

Not six minutes.

Not one dramatic night.

Six weeks.

She read Zane's letter.

Then refused to read anything else for four days.

Then asked for Rebecca's medical history.

Then stopped again.

Grief has no respectable sequence.

Eventually she said:

“I want to meet her.”

Catherine started crying when I told her.

“So do I.”

I looked at her.

“You've never seen her?”

“Not since she was sixteen.”

That hit me.

I had spent six weeks frightened Rebecca might somehow take my daughter.