Instead, I asked, “Does Claire think you abandoned her?”
“She did when we first met. Irene told her I’d chosen you because you were healthier.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“Was that true?” I asked.
“No. You were both healthy. There was no reason to choose either of you. I just let other people convince me I had to.”
“What changed Claire’s mind?”
Mom frowned. “She said she’d found something in Irene’s things after Irene died. She wouldn’t tell me what.”
I called Claire again.
“I found your mother’s letters,” she said when I asked. “Dozens of them, still sealed, in a box at the back of Irene’s closet.”
“She never gave them to you?”
“Not one. She told me my birth mother didn’t want contact. I believed her.”
Claire’s voice cracked.
“I spent years thinking the woman who kept my sister must have looked at me and decided I wasn’t worth keeping. Then I opened those envelopes…”
