We were a family. Imperfect, patched together by chance and choice, but real.
And then, last week, the past knocked on my door.
“Hello, Margaret,” she said smoothly. “I’m Alicia. We met on a plane eighteen years ago.”
It took me a moment, but then I saw it—the younger woman from that flight, the one who’d urged me to help the twins. My stomach dropped.
“You were sitting next to me,” I said slowly.
“I was,” she replied, already stepping past me into my living room as if she owned the place. Her heels clicked across the hardwood as she scanned the photos on the wall—birthday parties, graduations, Christmas mornings. Ethan and Sophie laughing through every stage of their lives.
Then she turned back to me and dropped the kind of sentence that makes the world tilt.
“I’m also the mother of those twins you took from the plane,” she said lightly. “I’ve come to see my children.”
Ethan and Sophie had just come down the stairs for breakfast. They stopped dead halfway down, eyes wide, bodies tense.
My heart hammered in my chest. I moved a little closer to them without thinking.
Alicia didn’t flinch. “I was twenty-three,” she said, almost bored. “I’d just gotten a career opportunity that could change everything. I had twins I never wanted, and I was drowning. I saw you, a woman shattered by grief, and I thought: maybe this is how everyone gets what they need.”
You didn’t give them up, I thought. You staged it.
“You manipulated me,” I whispered. “You set this up.”
“I gave them a better life than I could have back then,” she replied, shrugging. “You’re welcome.”
She reached into her designer handbag and pulled out a thick envelope.
Ethan instinctively stepped in front of Sophie.
“I hear my children are doing well,” she said. “Scholarships, good grades, impressive future prospects. I’m proud, really. But we have… a financial matter to settle. I need you both to sign something.”
Alicia held out the envelope as if she were presenting a gift.
“My father died last month,” she began. “Before he passed, he decided to punish me for what happened on that plane. He left his entire estate to my children.”
My blood ran cold.
“So you suddenly remembered you had kids,” I said quietly, “because there’s money involved.”
“The inheritance is complicated,” she replied coolly. “All you need to do”—she looked at Ethan and Sophie now—“is sign acknowledging me as your legal mother, and the estate becomes accessible. It’s a formality. Then you get more money than you could ever dream of.”
“And if we don’t?” Sophie asked.
A muscle in Alicia’s jaw twitched. “Then the estate goes to charity. You lose. I lose. Everyone loses.”
I’d heard enough.
“Get out of my house,” I said.
“This isn’t about you, Margaret,” she snapped. “They’re adults. They can decide if they want to stay here playing pretend family with the old woman who picked them up out of pity—or accept their real mother and everything that comes with her.”
Ethan’s voice was low and dangerous. “She didn’t pick us up out of pity. She loved us when you left us like trash.”
“I made a hard choice in an impossible situation,” Alicia shot back.
I walked to the phone and dialed a number I hadn’t used in a long time.
Within an hour, Caroline—my lawyer from the adoption years ago—was sitting in my living room with a legal pad and her reading glasses, looking at Alicia like something she’d scrape off her shoe.
“Let me see the documents,” she said.
Alicia handed over the envelope with that same smug expression. Continue reading…
