⸻
“I know,” Paige said, tears already streaming down her face. “I have spent six years hating myself for every single one of those moments, Adele. I need you to understand it wasn’t planned. Not at the beginning.”
⸻
“Explain it to me anyway,” I said. “Every single detail.”
⸻
Paige took a shaking breath. “You remember I’d been trying to have a baby for almost five years by then. Three miscarriages. Failed round after failed round of treatment. I was completely unraveling, and none of you fully knew how bad it had actually gotten for me.”
⸻
“That doesn’t explain stealing my daughter,” I said.
⸻
“Diane was on shift that night,” Paige continued. “The nurse. We’d been close since nursing school together. Elisa was born in distress, genuine distress, Adele — the doctors weren’t lying about that part. But she stabilized in the NICU within the first hour, quietly, before the attending physician had finished briefing your delivery team on what had happened.”
⸻
“And Diane didn’t tell anyone,” I said slowly, working through it.
“Diane called me instead,” Paige said. “I don’t fully understand, even now, what made either of us think it was a decision either of us had any right to make. I was desperate, Adele. Genuinely, dangerously desperate. Diane falsified the paperwork. I told everyone I was adopting internationally, moved to Millbrook for what I said was a job transfer, and raised her as my own from that point on.”
⸻
“You named her,” I said. “You kept part of her original name.”
⸻
“I couldn’t erase her completely,” Paige said. “I told myself that was some kind of penance, keeping Elisa close enough in her name that some part of the truth still existed, even if nobody else could see it.”
⸻
“You moved back to Fernbrook,” I said. “Recently. Why?”
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“A job opened up,” Paige said. “I told myself the odds of our paths actually crossing here were low enough to risk it. I never imagined the girls would end up in the exact same kindergarten classroom, let alone become friends within the first single day.”
⸻
I stood there for a long moment, working through six years of grief that had apparently never needed to exist in the shape I’d carried it in, alongside an entirely new, considerably sharper kind of anger I hadn’t had any use for until exactly this morning.
⸻
