And I hope there came a day when one of them reached for your hand without thinking.
My vision blurred.
Claire came downstairs a few minutes later.
“You okay?”
“I think so.”
She sat beside me.
“Do you wish you’d known?”
I thought about the interviews.
The fear.
The terrible macaroni.
Emma asking whether she was replacing Sophie.
The first time someone called me Mom.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because Rebecca was right.”
Claire waited.
“I needed to know I chose you because I wanted to. Not because I thought I owed something to a woman who was dying.”
Claire nodded.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
Then she rested her hand over mine on the table.
She did it casually, almost without thinking.
I looked down.
Rebecca’s last sentence came back to me.
I didn’t say anything.
I just turned my hand over and held Claire’s.
A few days later, I found the scrap of paper I had saved years before.
Somebody called me Mom today.
I slipped it into Rebecca’s envelope.
It felt like an answer she had waited 10 years to receive.
Then someone shouted from the hallway.
“Mom?”
I didn’t pause.
“Yeah?”
“Have you seen my keys?”
“Kitchen counter.”
“They’re not—”
A pause.
“Oh. Never mind.”
I laughed.
For years, part of me had been afraid that loving these 6 children meant leaving Andrew, Lucas, and Sophie behind.
I finally understood that it didn’t.
One family had never replaced another.
Love had simply made room.
Rebecca had written my name down.
Rachel had quietly opened the first door.
I chose to walk through it.
And after that, the 7 of us kept choosing one another.
That was the part nobody could have planned.
