“She’s the woman who adopted us. That has to mean something.”
We were three when Beatrice and her husband, Kenneth, took us in. They told us our biological mother had abandoned us and never come back to look for us. That sentence lived in me my whole childhood like a small, heavy stone.
Kenneth was good to us — front row at every school event, matching bikes one Christmas, “you boys are the most important people in my life.” Beatrice was not. “You should be grateful we gave you a home. Without us you’d be in an orphanage.” Simon went quiet over the years. I learned to apologize for existing.
When we were ten, Kenneth pa*sed away, and the last warmth went out of that house. By the time Simon and I graduated high school, Beatrice wouldn’t even come. “Looking after you isn’t my responsibility anymore, Mason.”
We built our own lives anyway. Simon, engineering. Me, design. And still, on her sixtieth, I showed up with lilies, murmuring “maybe people can change.”
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