shaking. A few of the relatives who’d always treated me like a houseguest were there.
And the room went completely still as I laid the placement record on her antique coffee table and said, out loud, what she had done.
She told a twenty-year-old girl that her baby was gone.
She arranged for that baby to be handed to strangers.
She falsified a loss, and she let me grieve an empty space for eighteen years, and she did it so her son wouldn’t be “trapped.”
Harriet lifted her chin and
