“You weren’t six. The letters started when you were seven. The first was printed in block letters on yellow lined paper. I still have it.” She’d read it so many times the paper had grown limp.

Dear Ant Lilly,

I know your my real mom and I love you very much. Could you come see me. I have a cat. His name is Spike. He is 7 to.
Love,
Kevin

Please dont tell my mom I wrote this leter. She mite cry.

“You wrote me eighteen letters over four years.”

“I really don’t remember.”

She risked taking a few steps toward him. “Maida and I had an agreement.”

“What kind of agreement?”

“I didn’t give you to them casually. You can’t believe that. We talked everything through. And I made long lists.” She realized she was twisting her hands, and she let them fall to her sides. “They had to promise never to spank you, not that they would have anyway. I told them they couldn’t criticize your music when you got to be a teenager, and they had to let you wear your hair however you wanted. Remember, I’d just turned eighteen.” She gave him a rueful smile. “I even tried to make them promise to buy you a red convertible for your sixteenth birthday, but they wisely refused.”

For the first time he smiled back at her. The movement was small, the slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth, but at least it was there.

She blinked, determined to get through this without shedding a tear. “One thing I didn’t back down on, though—I made them promise to always let you follow your dreams, even if they weren’t the same dreams they had for you.”

He cocked his head, all pretense of indifference gone.

“They hated letting you play football. They were so terrified that you’d get hurt. But I held them to their promise, and they never tried to stop you.” She could no longer meet his eyes. “All I had to do was give them one thing in exchange …”

She heard him move closer, and she looked up to see him step into a narrow shaft of sunlight.

“What was that?”

She could hear in his voice that he already knew. “I had to agree never to see you.”

She couldn’t look at him, and she bit her lip. “Open adoption didn’t exist then, or if it did, I didn’t know about it. They explained to me how easily confused children can get, and I believed them. They agreed to tell you who your birth mother was as soon as you were old enough to understand, and they sent me a hundred pictures over the years, but I could never visit you. As long as Maida and John were alive, you were to have just one mother.”

“You broke your promise once.” His lips barely moved. “When I was sixteen.”