I told them I was keeping my baby. For a while they fought me, then they softened — my mother came to appointments, my father stopped yelling. “We’ll help you,” they said at the kitchen table. “You won’t do this alone.”
I believed them. I got a part-time job, bought little outfits, and chose a name.
Nathan.
When he was born and they placed him in my arms, I knew I could never give him away.
Before the nurse took him for his checkup, I tucked my grandmother’s silver cross into his blanket. “So you’ll always have something from me.”
Hours later my parents walked in — not to help, but with adoption papers. Sign them, my father said, or don’t come home. Eighteen years old, nowhere to go, I signed, sobbing.
But I never stopped looking. Thirty-one years of agencies, records, investigators, dead ends. My parents always said the same thing: we know nothing more.
