My heart seemed to stop.
“There is something he never wanted you to discover.”
She touched the seal of the envelope.
“Open it.”
My fingers felt numb as I opened it and pulled out a folded document.
I unfolded it.
Within seconds, tears were running down my face.
I looked up at Anna.
She was crying too.
“No,” I whispered.
She nodded.
“Yes.”
Part 2
To understand why that document destroyed everything I thought I knew, you have to understand the story I’d been told my entire life.
My mother had died when I was a baby.
That was the story.
My father, Richard, almost never talked about her. When I was old enough to ask questions, he told me her name was Laura and that complications after childbirth had taken her life.
That was all I knew.
There were no photographs of her in our house.
No wedding album. No family pictures. Nothing tucked away in a drawer.
Whenever I asked, Dad said the memories were too painful and he’d put everything away.
I believed him.
Why wouldn’t I?
He was my father.
But I had Anna.
She started taking care of me when I was only eight months old, and throughout my childhood she was the closest thing I had to a mother.
