There was anger.
There was grief.
There was the painful realization that the man I thought I had married had known far more about my life than I had ever known about his.
But the hardest lesson wasn’t that my past had been different from what I believed.
It was that both Anna and I had been denied choices that should have belonged to us.
I should have been allowed to decide whether I wanted to know William.
Anna should have been allowed to decide whether she wanted to know her biological father.
And I should have been allowed to enter my marriage knowing the truth about the man I was marrying.
Rick had made those decisions for us.
He believed he was protecting something.
Instead, he took away our right to choose.
That became the lesson Anna and I carried forward.
From that point on, there was one rule in our home.
