“I raised him for forty years, Carol,” I said, my voice soft but firm.
“And you did what you could with your limited resources,” Carol said, patting my hand with a gesture that felt entirely empty. “But his life is on a different level now. Your job as a mother is officially over.”
She stood up, leaving her empty wine glass on my table, and walked back toward the dance floor where Ethan and Ashley were laughing.
The music stopped, and the master of ceremonies called for another round of applause for the new family.
The sound of two hundred people clapping for my replacement while I stared at my plate.
I did not wait for the cake to be cut. I walked out of the Willow Creek Country Club while the applause was still echoing off the high ceiling, took a cab back to my apartment, and unlocked the door to a quiet home.
The silence in the hallway felt heavy as I walked into my bedroom and reached for the zipper of my coral dress. I peeled the fabric down, stepped out of it, and hung it in the very back of the closet behind my winter coats.
The hanger clicked against the wooden bar, a thin, lonely sound in the empty room. I sat on the edge of my mattress in my slip, looking down at my bare feet against the worn beige carpet.
I opened the bottom drawer of my walnut dresser, reaching beneath the stacks of winter sweaters until my fingers touched the cold metal of my old lockbox. I pulled it out, set it on the mattress, and turned the key I kept hidden inside a hollowed-out wooden thread spool.
Inside lay the thick packet of blue-backed legal documents my father had left me five years ago, along with three letters from my late sister, Julie. I picked up the first letter, dated August twelfth, forty years ago, written in her hurried, slanting handwriting.
Julie had been the one who loaned me the deposit for the adoption agency fees and helped me draft the original petition when the state threatened to delay the placement. She had worked as a clerk at the county courthouse, knowing exactly which forms would bypass the backlog.
I held her letter to my nose, but the scent of her lavender soap had faded decades ago, leaving only the smell of old paper and dust. She had passed away three years before my father, never living to see the man Ethan had become.
Her letter reminded me of the three thousand dollars she had pulled from her own savings to help me secure the adoption. I unfolded the second page of her letter, where she had written that a child chosen by love was worth every sacrifice we would ever make.
Below her letters lay the trust certificate, detailing the commercial property on North Avenue and the municipal bonds my father had spent forty years accumulating. I traced the raised seal on the corner of the deed, the paper thick and stiff under my thumb.
The total value on the last quarterly statement from June was eight hundred forty thousand dollars, a sum I had never touched, living instead on my school administrator pension. Ethan knew about my small savings account, but he had never known about this box or the properties listed inside it.
