“And part was me.” I wondered if knowing I was hers had just been too tough emotionally. Or was I simply an annoyance? After her marriage Wendy had waited a surprisingly length of time to have Holly and Noelle. Had the thought of another pregnancy and childbirth been such a horror? Had she only succumbed because Bryce had insisted, and she hadn’t wanted to lose him?

“Did you know she might react this way?” I asked.

A mockingbird in a nearby pine began and ended a complicated aria before she turned to me. “I’m afraid we did. She tried to persuade us to give you up. She made threats. She was still very young—”

“Stop making excuses for her!”

She closed her eyes. “You have a right to be angry, but Ryan, please understand what I’m about to say. We knew bringing you home, pretending to the world you were our daughter, would create a divide in our family. We knew that some people would guess, and you might even find out the truth before you were ready. We knew Wendy would not forgive easily, but we brought you home anyway. We knew we could never forgive ourselves if we didn’t. And we knew—” Her voice caught, and my mother, who never cried, suddenly had tears running down her cheeks. “We knew we would mourn your loss forever. And so, we made a choice between you and your sister.”

They had chosen me. They had chosen a baby with serious health problems, not knowing whether I would need more surgery in the near future, not knowing if I would survive. And despite that, they had chosen me over the daughter they had raised for eighteen years, the daughter they had doted on, the daughter whose entire childhood had been documented, preserved and treasured in the pages of scrapbooks.

“Ryan Rose.” This time she took my hand, threaded her fingers through mine, and held it tight. “I have never, not once, regretted that decision.”

We sat that way, as I tried to believe her. I wanted the conversation to end on that note. But I knew it couldn’t.

“I grew up in your house. And I heard stories about how perfect my sister was. I never measured up, and I knew that.” I freed my hand and held it out to stop her from interrupting. “You were never cruel, but you had less invested in me. That was clear. Maybe you were just older, weary—”

She interrupted anyway. “I was both, yes, and so was your dad, but that had nothing to do with the way we treated you.”

“So what did? Because there was a difference. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

“Of course there was. We treated you differently because we understood how many mistakes we’d made with your sister. I realized we had to change the way we raised you.”

She was no longer attempting to explain away Wendy’s faults. “Well, you certainly did change.”

“You don’t think it was a struggle? Especially at first with your health problems? It would have been so easy to shelter you, to hover over you the way we’d hovered over Wendy and guided every step she took. We wanted to wrap you in cotton. Every time you got winded from running, or forgot to take your meds, or refused to do anything the easy way, we wanted to grab you and store you in a closet until you finally grew good sense.”