anywhere.
My mother.
She was standing in our kitchen—my mother, who hadn’t spoken to me since I was seventeen years old—red-faced and visibly shaking with rage, shoving a thick stack of papers aggressively toward my husband.
“How could you do this to her?!” she was screaming, her voice hoarse with fury. “How could you lie to my daughter for all these years? How could you steal her entire life from her?“
I froze completely in the doorway, my work bag still on my shoulder, unable to process what I was seeing.
“Mom?” I whispered, my voice barely audible. “What are you doing here? How did you even find us?“
She whipped around to face me, her eyes blazing with an emotion I couldn’t quite identify—anger, yes, but something else too. Something that looked almost like guilt.
“Sit down,” she said sharply, pointing to one of our kitchen chairs. “You need
