And it looks like a secret I kept for fifteen years.
Every birthday, every Christmas, there was a gift “from Mom.”
A card in careful handwriting that said Love always, Mommy.
I bought every one of them. I signed every card. I forged fifteen years of a mother’s love so that my daughters would not grow up believing the woman who made them simply didn’t care.
I told myself they deserved to think they had a mother out there who loved them, even if she didn’t.
I never planned for them to find out.
But children grow up. And four years ago, cleaning the attic, Audrey found a box of blank cards in the same handwriting as every “Mom” card she’d ever received — and underneath them, a folder of legal papers I’d hidden for fifteen years.
She sat me down. She made me tell her the truth.
All of it.
