Including what was in that folder.
Chapter 3: The Folder in the Attic
Here is what Monica did fifteen years ago that I never told the girls.
She didn’t just leave.
Before she walked out, Victor’s lawyers had made a request — a clean start, no loose ends, no complications from a previous family. And Monica had agreed.
She signed a Voluntary Relinquishment of Parental Rights. All six girls. In her own hand, of her own free will, she legally gave up every daughter she had, so that she could begin her shining new life with Victor unencumbered.
She didn’t lose her children in a bitter custody fight.
She signed them away like a woman returning a coat that didn’t fit.
I kept those papers hidden for fifteen years, the same way I kept signing those cards, because I could not bear for my girls to know their mother had put her name to a document erasing them.
