“It would be harder,” Natalie finally said, “but you know I can look for her without your help. I could hire a private investigator.” She and Kyle had discussed that possibility the night before, in case her mother refused to cooperate. Now, Natalie kept her voice gentle, filled with as much compassion as it could hold. “But I came to you first, because I didn’t want to hide anything. I wanted you to know that this isn’t about you or Dad.” She felt a barb of tears in her throat, and she had to swallow them down before she went on. “You are my mother. You will always be my mother. The one who held me and took care of me and made sure I had everything I could ever possibly need. You and Daddy both did that. And I’m not looking to replace you. You could never lose me . . . you have me. I’m already yours.”
Her mother’s chin trembled, and before Natalie could say anything else, her mom stood up and without a word, strode out of the room.
“Shit,” Natalie muttered, pushing on the sore spot of her cheekbone with her thumb. She didn’t know why she’d even bothered coming. She should have just found her birth mom on her own and told her mother about it after the fact. After Natalie could show her mother that the other woman wasn’t any kind of threat—she was simply a part of Natalie’s history, a history she was entitled to know.
Her phone buzzed in her purse, which she’d left on the counter next to the half-eaten box of scones, so she rose to get it. “On a quick recess,” Kyle’s text message read. “How’s it going?”
“She just walked out on me,” Natalie responded, grateful that her husband had remembered what she was going to do that morning.
“Not surprising.”
Natalie’s gratitude was quickly replaced by a flash of irritation at her husband’s seemingly flippant remark, but she did her best to push it down, telling herself that he was in work mode, focused solely on pointing out the facts of a situation. She reminded herself that there were two parts of her husband—lawyer-Kyle and family-Kyle. Sometimes, when she needed one, she got the other. “No,” she typed, “but that doesn’t make it any easier.”
“Sorry,” he said, and she knew that her conclusion about his current mind-set was spot-on. “Be home as soon as I can tonight, OK?”
Natalie thanked him and shoved her phone back in her purse, trying to think about what else she could possibly say to her mother in order to get through to her. But before she could land on anything that might work, she heard footsteps behind her on the hardwood floor and spun around. “Look, Mom,” she began. “I’m sorry.” But then Natalie saw the box in her mother’s hands, and she froze where she stood. The box was white, its edges slightly torn and yellowed with age. “What’s that?” she asked, feeling her heartbeat quicken.
“It’s what you wanted,” her mother said. Her face was pale. “All we know. Everything before you were ours.” She held the box out to Natalie, who took it from her. It was lighter than she’d expected; it seemed like something as significant as what her parents had kept from her all these years should have more heft. She fought the urge to rip the box open right then and there, but she didn’t want to hurt her mother any more than she knew she already had.
“It’s okay,” her mom said, as though she had read Natalie’s thoughts. “I just called your dad. He agreed it was time for you to see it.”
“Are you sure?” Natalie asked.
“No. But one of us should be here when you do.”
Natalie cocked her head and furrowed her eyebrows, wondering what, exactly, she was about to see that her mother thought she needed to witness. But then it didn’t matter, because she set the box down on the kitchen island and lifted its lid.
The first thing she saw was a purple blanket with a silky but threadbare trim. “I remember this,” she said. Her voice quavered. “I used to sleep with it.”
Her mother nodded, pressing a closed fist against her mouth. “Until you were Hailey’s age,” she said when she dropped her arm back to her side.
“It’s the same color as my delivery boxes,” Natalie said, a bit dazed by the realization. She remembered the day she’d chosen the lavender boxes for her business over white ones, something about the color appealing to her in a way she couldn’t explain. She looked at her mother through glassy eyes. “Did my birth mother give it to me?”
“I don’t know,” her mom admitted. “Maybe. You had it the day we came to get you from the social worker. You wouldn’t go to sleep without it.”
Natalie lifted the blanket out of the box and set it on the counter. Her birth mother might have wrapped this around her. Natalie swallowed hard, then looked inside the box again. There was a single manila file folder with no label on the tab. She reached for it, but her mother’s voice stopped her.
“Honey, wait. I need you to understand something, first.”
Natalie looked at her mom, then back at the folder. Her pulse raced. “What?”
Her mom shifted her feet, her eyes darting to the floor, then back up to Natalie. “Your father and I did what we thought was best at the time.”
An alarm began to sound inside Natalie’s head, screaming in sync with the pounding beneath her eye. “What are you talking about?”