“I just want to get this over with before I change my mind.”
“Oh.” She lifted her eyebrows, grabbing the papers and a pen and placing them on a clipboard in my lap. She proceeded to ask me several standard questions, most of them geared toward my mental health and family history.
“So it looks like you’re electing for an open adoption with Samuel and Rebecca Valentine as the adoptive parents,” she said, reading over my paperwork. “I noticed there is no birth father listed on the birth certificate paperwork you filled out earlier.”
“He’s out of the picture.” My heart burned with an ache no amount of tender, apologetic looks from Sandy could ever anesthetize. “Long gone.”
Sandy pursed her lips and offered a sorry expression. “I’m not allowed to state opinions here, so this goes off the record. You understand?”
I nodded.
“You seem like a bright young girl, and I know Dr. Valentine from his residency here at the hospital,” she said. “You couldn’t have picked a nicer family for your daughter.”
“I know.”
“I do have to tell you this though, since you’ve not listed a birth father, there is a chance that if the biological father does come back in the picture, he could sue for custody of your daughter,” she said. “It’s rare, but it can happen.”
“Like I said, he’s long gone.”
“Did you get to hold her yet?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Oh honey, you need to hold her. You’ll regret it if you don’t. So many of my birth mothers say that.” She stood up and picked the baby up, waddling back and placing her gently in my arms.
The physical pain of childbirth had nothing on the kind of pain that seared through my entire body at the thought of giving her away. Of never knowing her.
I waited until the social worker left the room before clearing my throat and whispering the very last thing I’d ever say before I gave my daughter away, “I love you and I’m sorry.”
I could’ve gone on and on. I could’ve explained my reasoning and logic. I could’ve justified my decision six ways from Sunday. Instead, I left it short and simple. Maybe someday I’d get a chance to know her, and maybe when she was an adult woman, I’d sit her down and explain all about how much I loved her and how all I ever wanted was for her to have the best life - the kind of life nineteen-year-old me could never give her.
The social worker returned, glancing over the paperwork one last time before leaving and ushering Sam and Rebecca back in.
“You want to hold your daughter?” I asked Sam as he stood back a ways. He inched closer, taking her in his arms and making her look even tinier. Rebecca peeked over his shoulder as they both looked down at the tiny little angel who suddenly completed their family.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Knock, knock,” I called through the storm door screen of Rebecca and Sam’s colonial.
“Coming,” Rebecca called out. Her lips parted into an open grin the second she saw me. “Dakota!”
She pushed the door open and ushered me in. Piles of neatly folded clothes lined her coffee table.
“I was just doing a little laundry. Excuse the mess.”
Little pink t-shirts and miniature white socks rested in rows next to fluffy white towels in tidy stacks. Her honey hair was pulled back into a perfect chignon just above the nape of her neck. I imagined her weeks were filled with PTA meetings, soccer practice pick ups, and grocery shopping, and yet I’d never seen anyone so happy.
Rebecca wore domesticity the way high fashion models wore couture, with ease and an innate elegance. She made it look so easy. Almost covetable.
“So what brings you by this afternoon?” she asked with a smile as she folded a little pair of pants and smoothed out the crinkles with her hand. I watched as she glanced up at the clock on the wall, which read two o’clock. Most moms would’ve been counting down their final hour of pure silence, but I doubted Rebecca did anything like that.
“I just wanted to come by and say I was sorry,” I said, holding my shoulders back.
“For what, darling?”
“For never coming around.” I tilted my head to the side. “After you and Sam left Lexington with Mabry, I was just sort of in a weird place. I wanted to finish school as fast as I could and get the hell out of Kentucky.”
“I remember that,” Rebecca said with a carefree chuckle, swatting her knee. Maybe it hadn’t bothered her as much as I thought it did? “Weren’t you taking, like, eighteen credits a semester and summer classes and all that? Sam thought you were insane!”
“I was. You know how I get when I have a goal in my head. I do whatever it takes to reach it,” I said, adding, “at any cost.”
Rebecca cleared her throat, her face falling into a serious expression. “Listen, Dakota. Apology accepted but not necessary.” She stood up and began placing her neat stacks of folded clothes into a nearby laundry basket. “People grow up. Their priorities change. They move. They move on. That’s life, darling.”
I placed my hand across my heart. “I still feel horrible, Becca. I mean, it didn’t hit me until I saw Mabry the other day. I’ve missed out on almost the first decade of her life. Your life as a mother. We used to be best friends.”
“Best cousins,” she corrected me. She’d always said best cousins was a hundred times more important than being best friends. It was like having the best of both worlds. Though she’d always been more like a shoulder to cry on and, at times, a surrogate mother figure to me than anything else.
“Yes, best cousins. And I abandoned you – and Mabry - like some selfish asshole.” I shook my head at myself. Someone needed to do it, and Rebecca was too damn sweet.
“Sweetheart, you were in survival mode.” She hoisted the basket against her slender hip. “Sometimes in order to survive, we have to forget. That’s all you were trying to do, Dakota. Forget. And I can’t imagine it’s easy watching someone else raise your child. I might have done the same thing in your shoes. No one holds it against you, Dakota. Believe me.” Her warm gaze washed over me like melancholy rain before she shook her head and sighed. “He really did a number on you.”
“He wants me back, Rebecca.” I rolled my eyes. “Can you believe that? All this time, and he thinks he can just sweep me up off my feet again like the last ten years never happened.”
“Are you going to let him?”
I gathered my thoughts and pushed them to the surface with about as much strength as a knight worn from battle. “I don’t know.”
“If loving and forgiving were that easy, everyone’d be doing it, Dakota.” Rebecca flashed a quaint smile. “Don’t let the past hold your future hostage.”
She left the room with the basket of clothes and returned empty handed a minute later.