I heard her making excuses for Wendy. “Were she and Sean a couple?”

“No, that’s why nothing came together for a long time. She went out with one boy, then another. In her class everyone seemed to go out in groups, like pack animals. I thought that was good, that it was less likely she’d find herself in any trouble.”

“And then, wow, the big prize.”

She took my hand, which surprised me. “Of course, at first we didn’t see her pregnancy that way, sweetheart. We were devastated. We wanted the best for your sister, and instead she couldn’t start college when her friends did. We had to make up a story. We had to find a way to protect her, and then we had to send her to Mexico to live with old friends for the first six months of the pregnancy. They took her on as their au pair.”

“She went along with that?”

A shadow crossed her face. “Wendy knew if she didn’t carry the baby to term, she would no longer be welcome in our house.”

“How Victorian. You threatened her? Forced her? What were her choices?”

“When she had sex with Sean Riley, she made her choice. And neither your father nor I could have lived with a different outcome. In the end, she agreed that having the baby and giving it up was the right thing to do. Once we helped her see that nobody would ever know, and that in years to come, she could look back at what was, yes, something of a sacrifice—”

I couldn’t believe her wording. “Something? Something of a sacrifice?”

“We raised your sister to believe that life is sacred. How would she have felt if she’d gone through with an abortion? She would have regretted it until her dying day.”

I was in a peculiar position, of course, since this time, my best interests had been in line with those of my parents. Yet I wondered if Wendy regretted my birth every bit as much as she would have regretted the alternative. Living in a foreign country, taking care of the children of acquaintances, counting down the days until labor began, and then returning with nothing to show for those months of isolation except stretch marks? I couldn’t even imagine it.

“Finish the story,” I said.

“We told everyone that Wendy wanted to travel. She’d taken four years of Spanish in school and was fairly proficient. So she told her friends she was going to spend a year in Mexico, traveling with family friends and polishing her language skills.”

“And people bought this?”

“Like I told you, she had lots of friends, but none I’d call close. And your sister is so good at making people believe her. By the time she embellished her story, I think her friends were sorry they weren’t going with her.”

“And then...” I held up my palm. “She was supposed to give me away?”

She bit her lip. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen her do that. Clearly, this part was going to be hard.