I stared at Mom.
“Who is Anna?”
Mom looked at me as though she’d forgotten I was standing there.
Her lips trembled.
“A little girl I loved.”
Helen opened the box.
The first thing she removed was a photograph.
The edges were curled.
A young woman stood outside a small white house holding the hand of a girl with dark braids.
The woman was my mother.
She couldn’t have been more than 25.
“She was my sister’s daughter,” Mom said, eyes glued to the photograph.
Her voice was barely audible.
“Her mother died when Anna was six. Her father was working away most of the time then, so Anna came to live with me.”
“At first I thought I was taking care of her because my sister couldn’t anymore. Somewhere along the way, she just became mine too.”
“For how long?”
“Almost six years.”
Six years.
I’d known my mother all my life, and somehow there had been an entire child in her life I’d never known about.
