She changed my diapers. She took me to my doctor’s appointments. She taught me to read. She was with me nearly every single day of my life.
“But why didn’t you ever just tell me?” I asked.
“Because your father made silence part of the deal.”
My stomach knotted.
“He said that if I ever told you I was your mother before he decided you were ready, he would cut me out of your life completely.”
“And you agreed to that?”
“I was terrified of losing you.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I told myself that being your babysitter was better than being nobody at all.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. So I asked the only question that really mattered.
“What happened when I turned thirteen, Anna?”
She looked at the box.
“That happened.”
For illustrative purposes only
Part 4
She slid the present across the table toward me.
The yellow paper had faded with age, and one corner had been patched with clear tape at some point, probably more than once.
“I bought this when you were twelve,” she said.
I unwrapped it slowly, almost afraid of what I’d find. Inside was a small wooden box, and inside that, resting on a square of velvet, was a silver locket.
My hands started shaking as I picked it up.
“Open it,” Anna urged.
I pressed the tiny clasp. One side held a baby picture of me. The other showed Anna, much younger, lying in a hospital bed with a newborn held against her chest. She looked utterly exhausted. And completely, radiantly happy.
“Is that me?”
She nodded.
I turned the locket over. There was an engraving on the back:
From your mother, who was always closer than you knew.
For a few seconds, I couldn’t speak at all.
“That’s what you were going to give me on my thirteenth birthday?”
“Yes.”
“So that’s why you said it was something I’d understand when I was older.”
“Yes. You were getting old enough to ask harder questions. I couldn’t stand the thought of you growing into a man without knowing who I really was.”
I closed my fingers around the locket.
“So Dad found out about the gift?”
“I told him.”
That surprised me.
“You told him?”
“I knew he’d be angry. I didn’t expect him to panic the way he did.”
Part 5
The night before my thirteenth birthday, Anna went to my father and told him she couldn’t keep lying to me anymore.
“He refused to let me tell you,” she said. Then she paused. “So I told him I wasn’t asking his permission anymore.”
That sounded exactly like the Anna I remembered.
“What did he do?”
“He said that if I told you the truth, I’d never see you again. I told him I was going to tell you anyway.”
Dad fired her that night. He ordered her to leave and never contact me again. By the next morning, he had taken her off my school’s approved pickup list and stopped answering her calls.
It turned out her apartment belonged to one of Dad’s relatives, and she was told to clear out immediately. Her phone line had been on Dad’s family plan, so he simply had it shut off.
That explained how she’d vanished so completely, so fast. She hadn’t run. She’d been erased.
Then I remembered the other envelope. The empty one from Dad’s desk drawer.
“What about the money?”
Anna frowned.
“What money?”
“The cash Dad said you stole. Several hundred dollars.”
Her face went very still.
“I never touched a cent of his money.”
I believed her before she’d even finished the sentence. Maybe because part of me wanted to. Or maybe because the last twelve years suddenly made a terrible kind of sense.
“If you’re really my mother,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant it to, “why didn’t you ever try to reach me?”
“I did try.”
“I wrote to you,” I said. “Over and over. Every letter came back.”
“Mine didn’t.”
I looked up.
“What?”
“I wrote to you for years. Constantly at first. Later, only on your birthdays. Your father must have kept them.”
I stared at her.
“You sent them to Dad’s house?”
She nodded. The same house where I’d lived until I left for college. The same house where I’d checked the mailbox a thousand times hoping for some sign of her. I felt sick to my stomach.
“After a while, I stopped trusting the mail,” she said. “But I never stopped writing. I kept every letter. I have all of them.”
“Then why didn’t you come for me?”
“I tried. But your father or the new nanny was always there, and I’d been barred from your school.”
Then I’d gone off to college. I’d changed my phone number twice. I barely touched social media. Anna had no idea where I was.
