“…your daughter has been looking for you.”
I dropped the letter.
For years, my parents had refused to talk about what they’d done. They insisted it was “for the best.” They never told me where my baby went. Closed adoption, they said. Nothing to be done.
Now suddenly, after twenty-four years, there was “important news”?
My hands shook as I read on.
She recently took a DNA test. She matched with a relative on my side. She knows the truth. She wants to meet you — if you’re willing.
I couldn’t breathe.
My husband found me sitting on the kitchen floor, the letter crumpled in my lap.
“What is it?” he asked.
I handed it to him.
He read it slowly. Then his knees hit the tile beside me.
“She’s alive,” he whispered.
Alive.
All those birthdays we’d imagined. All those what-ifs. The tiny hospital bracelet I’d kept hidden in a box for decades. The ache that never left.
“She’s alive,” I repeated.
A week later, I received an email.
Subject line: I think you’re my mom.
I stared at it for an hour before opening it.
Her name was Lily. She wrote that she’d grown up loved. That her adoptive parents had told her she was chosen. But once she turned eighteen, she started searching.
“I don’t hate you,” she wrote. “I just want to know you.”
That sentence broke something open inside me.
We agreed to meet in a quiet park halfway between our towns.
When I saw her walking toward me, time folded in on itself.
She had my eyes.
My husband gripped my hand so tight it almost hurt.
She stopped a few feet away, unsure.
“Hi,” she said softly.
I couldn’t speak. I just pulled her into my arms.
And this time…
No one took her away.
We cried for years of lost time. We talked for hours. She asked questions. I answered every one honestly — even the painful parts.
I told her I never gave her up willingly.
She said she always felt like a piece of her story was missing.
We didn’t erase the past.
But we reclaimed the future.
My parents never apologized the way I needed them to.
But I didn’t need their permission anymore.
Because the baby they stole from me found her way back.
And when she called me “Mom” for the first time, it healed a wound I’d carried for 24 years.
