She’d kept the P.O. box active the entire time, exactly as promised, checking it faithfully every few months for eighteen years, never once receiving anything until my own call finally came through instead.
“I thought about reaching out sooner more times than I can count,” she told all three of us, during the second call. “I made myself wait, because I meant every word I wrote in that letter. I wanted the choice to actually belong to them, completely, once they were old enough to make it freely.”
PART 12
Nora and Callie met her in person two months later, a careful, emotional first meeting at a neutral coffee shop roughly halfway between our home and hers, the four of us sitting together for nearly three hours while eighteen years of separate history slowly, cautiously started finding common ground.
I watched my daughters meet their biological mother for the first time, watched Marisol’s face as she took in two grown young women who carried pieces of her features I’d never fully registered until I saw them standing beside her directly.
