Chapter 4: Two States Away
Diane had not known.
That was the thing that undid me, when it finally came apart.
Eric’s sister was not a villain.
She was a woman who’d been handed a traumatized, silent little girl and a story about a mother who didn’t want her, and who had done the only thing her heart knew how to do.
She had loved her.
For eight years, two states away, my daughter had been raised as “Janie” — a quiet girl who didn’t talk much about where she came from, who had nightmares she couldn’t explain, who sometimes drew two children when the teacher asked her to draw her family and couldn’t say why.
She had been told her mother gave her away.
She had grown up believing she was unwanted.
When the detectives and I drove up to Diane’s house, I did not know what I would find, or whether an eleven-minutes-younger baby who’d reached for her brother before she could see would know me at all.
