As for Tara — I don’t know, and I’ve made my peace with not knowing. Wherever she is, she’s living inside the choice she made seventeen years ago and renewed every single day she didn’t write back. That’s its own kind of sentence. I don’t wish her harm. I just finally, completely, stopped wishing her anything at all.
I made a promise once, standing over two cribs at three in the morning, running on no sleep with grief folded up small in my chest. I promised two babies that nobody else wanted that they would never, ever feel abandoned.
The woman who left them came back seventeen years later to tell them blood is blood.
She was wrong, and my sons told her so, in my own kitchen, better than I ever could have.
Blood didn’t warm the bottles. Blood didn’t stay for the fevers. Blood didn’t tie the ties or paint the fences or sit up all night in the ER.
