“Can you begin to understand? They say it happens more than you’d think, you know—people trying for years, years, and then the moment they adopt: boom. But we had never even in our wildest dreams, imagined such a thing. We never imagined Abigail being anything other than an only child. And then…how were we to tell her the truth then? After we’d had a second child, the kind of child we’d tried to have for so long? Can you understand what that would have felt like to her to know that; what it would have done to her?” She looks at me. “How could a child in her position not have grown up thinking they were second-best? That they were ‘unnecessary,’ once we had you?” She shakes her head. “Of course it wasn’t how we felt. We thought we’d won the world’s greatest lottery, to have you both. But how could we have explained all that to a child like Abigail and expected her not to feel…superfluous?”

I sit, dazed. My brain pounds with conflicting thoughts. I know—of course I know—what Mom means. And yet I hate her right now for not telling us the truth.

Mom sweeps a hand under her reddening eyes.

“You see, don’t you? How it would have felt to her? And of course, by the time she got to an age where we could have begun to talk about such things…” She shakes her head. “From the beginning, Gillian, I couldn’t seem to get it right with her. Even as a baby, she cried so much. So restless. It seemed like I was always getting it wrong. We were always this close to upsetting the apple cart. How could we have thrown something like that into the mix?”

I want to get up from my chair—I need water, or to move, I need something—but dizziness pushes me back down.

“Gill,” Oliver says. “Are you okay?”

I shake my head, then stop when it feels like everything in there’s going tumbling. I look back at my mother.

“Mom…this is huge. You get that, right? This changes everything? It’s like our whole childhood was—was a lie.”

She puts her hand to her mouth, her fingers curling in on themselves like she’s protecting something, and shakes her head.

“It wasn’t a lie, Gillian. It was real.”

“But you and Dad kept this from us. And…” I choke up. “And now he’s gone.”

Mom looks down at the table. She draws a breath.

“I regret that,” she says. “I regret very much, that Abigail—and you—that you never got to talk to him about this. But we made our decision long ago. We never thought of revising it. We never thought you’d know.”