I honestly thought it was going to be something horrible. Debt. A secret family. Maybe even some scam from Ethan’s past before we met.
Instead, inside the envelope was a stack of old photographs from the orphanage.
Most of them I’d already seen before in scrapbooks over the years. Birthday parties with sheet cake. Christmas mornings with donated toys. Kids lined up outside the cafeteria in winter coats too big for them.
But one picture stopped me cold.
It was Ethan as a little boy sitting in his wheelchair beside a woman I’d never seen before. On the back, somebody had written: “For my son. I’ll come back when I can walk through that door sober.”
The man at my apartment introduced himself as Ethan’s uncle. He told me Ethan’s mother had spent years addicted to pain pills after a car accident. By the time she got clean, Ethan had already been moved through multiple foster placements and she lost track of him completely.
Apparently she’d been searching for him quietly for over twenty years.
The reason the man came the morning after our wedding wasn’t to ruin our marriage.
Ethan’s mother had died three days earlier.
And in her obituary folder was a newspaper clipping about our wedding announcement somebody mailed to her nursing home