PART 8
“You’ve had this since you were ten,” I said slowly, still staring at the letter. “Eight years. You’ve been carrying this by yourselves for eight entire years.”
“We were so scared,” Callie said. “Not of finding her. Scared of you thinking we didn’t want to be your daughters anymore, just because we wanted to know the truth about where we came from too. It felt like those two things weren’t supposed to be able to exist at the same time, and we didn’t know how to explain that we needed both.”
“You could have told me,” I said. “Any point in eight years, you could have—”
“The letter said not to,” Nora said. “Not until eighteen. We took that really seriously, Dad. Some part of us decided, pretty early on, that following exactly what she asked was the only thing we could actually do for her, since we didn’t know anything else about her circumstances or why she needed us to wait.”
I sat down heavily in my own kitchen chair, the letter still trembling slightly in my hands.
“I’m not angry,” I said, once I trusted my voice again. “I need you both to hear that clearly. I understand exactly why you waited. I just wish I could have carried part of this weight with you, instead of you carrying it alone for eight years.”
PART 9
We sat together at that kitchen table until nearly midnight, working through everything the letter had unearthed all at once — my own complicated feelings about a woman I’d never met who’d apparently chosen me based on a newspaper article, my daughters’ eight years of careful silence, and the question hanging over all of it now that the truth was finally out in the open.
“Do you want to call the number,” I asked them both, sometime past eleven. “Tonight, or ever. I want to be clear that whatever you decide, I’ll support it completely.”
Nora and Callie looked at each other for a long moment, the particular silent conversation twins seem to manage without needing actual words.
“We want to try,” Callie finally said. “Not tonight. But soon. We’ve had eight years to think about this, Dad. We’re ready.”
PART 10
We called the number three days later, all three of us sitting around the same kitchen table, my hand resting on the phone between us like some part of me still needed physical contact with the moment.
A woman answered on the fourth ring, her voice cautious, careful. “Hello?”
“Is this Marisol Vance,” I asked.
