know,” I said. “I just feel like a burden.”
“So what if you are?” Mia asked. “You’re allowed to be right now. I’m not going anywhere tonight. I’m drunk.” She snorted. “This is like a night out for me.”
“Some night out,” I said.
“Stop it,” she said. “Open the letter. Get it over with.”
I sighed and slid my finger along the flap and tore it open.
It was a single sheet of paper.
Handwritten from my mother.
The sight of her writing brought tears to my eyes.
I shouldn’t have been reading it then.
Chocolate, booze… and emotions…
I started to read the letter, blinking through the tears, and couldn’t believe what I was reading.
My father passed away when I was only two.
I honestly had no memories of him.
My mother told me he died of a heart attack.
She never cried about his death. She only talked about how good of a man he was. And a father to me.
She wrote about him in the letter.
Because there was a secret she had to tell me.
A secret she felt safe confessing only after she was gone.
I folded the letter after reading it and I stared at Mia.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I was adopted.”
“What?”
“That’s what the letter says. I was adopted. They couldn’t have a baby so they adopted me. I was a year old when they adopted me. Then a year later my father died. So my mother raised me alone. She never told me…”
My head swirled.
I couldn’t believe I was calm.
I handed Mia the letter.
As she read it, I looked out the living room window.
Adopted.
I wasn’t even sure what to think or feel.
So my entire life my mother loved me, raised me, and that was all I knew.
Now after her death, I’m allowed to read a letter…
“Bree,” Mia said. “This is crazy.”
“Right?” I asked.
“Why are you so calm?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Am I having a nervous breakdown?”
“I don’t know if you are, but I feel like I am,” Mia said.
My teeth began to chatter.
Mia tossed the letter aside, moved toward me and hugged me.
“I don’t even know what to say,” she said. “Sorry? I’m happy for you? I don’t know, Bree. You were raised by a strong, amazing woman. I think that’s all that matters.”
“Then why even tell me?” I asked.
“Maybe for medical reasons,” Bree said. “Maybe she figured if something happened and she was alive, she could tell the doctors. But now… she can’t. Or maybe she wants you to find your birth parents.”
At the bottom of the letter my mother wrote down the names of my birth parents.
“Or…” Mia broke the hug. “Maybe she’s giving you another chance at having parents. Right?”
“They could be dead too,” I said. “Is that what I want? To track down people who gave me up for adoption?”
Mia shook her head. “I don’t know what to say or do right now.”
I looked at the letter on the floor.
I looked at Mia.
I took a deep breath.
“I think we should just keep drinking.”
A few hours later, Mia was asleep on the couch.
With her drunk snoring that always made me shake my head.
The louder she snored, the drunker she was.
Yet if she got sick while drinking, she would sleep silently.
I stumbled around the apartment, the letter in my hand.
My entire life had been knocked over in a second.
My mother died in a car accident. Her ashes were in a box on my dining room table. There were flowers and slowly rotting fruit on the table too. I had a letter left to me that confessed probably the biggest secret of my mother’s life.
I was adopted.
I wasn’t actually her daughter. Or at least not by blood.
Did that even matter?
I had no clue.
I had questions that would never get answered.
The apartment felt small.
It was crammed. Claustrophobic. I felt like I couldn’t take a deep breath.
I looked at the couch and knew I could wake Mia up.
It was just a mild panic attack.
Everything hitting me at once.
The chocolate in my stomach not sitting well. The booze racing through my head, mixing with the thoughts, memories, and realities, making me feel sick.
I put the letter on the table.
I went into the kitchen and got a drink of water.
That did nothing.
You’re adopted. Your mother is dead. You have to carry that secret alone now. Everyone wants to talk to you about your mother. But there’s another mother out there. Maybe. She could be dead too.
I needed to get away.
Out of the apartment.
Out of town.
I needed to leave…
I scrambled to find my phone.
It was after one in the morning.
I