PART 3 — THE HOSPITAL BRACELET
I went out to the car where Rachel Hollis was waiting, and I asked her to come inside, because Grace deserved the truth from both of us together.
Fourteen years ago, Rachel had been young and alone and had gone to an agency in Nashville believing she would have time to decide. But my mother-in-law had hired a lawyer to speed things up, a man who told us the birth mother had already signed everything, and who told Rachel things that were not true, and who was paid in cash to make a hard thing happen fast.
Rachel never freely gave Grace up. She was pushed, and rushed, and misled, by people who wanted the adoption done before she could change her mind.
The choir director who gave my daughter a solo was the frightened girl my own husbands mother had maneuvered out of her baby fourteen years before.
I could have slammed the door. Grace was mine. I had rocked her through every fever and sat through every recital. But a lie had been told to get her, and I would not build my daughters life on top of it.
We did it carefully, with a counselor, at Graces pace. I never stopped being her mother. You are my real mom, Grace told me that night, the only one I want, and she meant it. But she also got to know the woman who had wanted her all along and never truly let her go.
As for the lawyer and what my mother-in-law had arranged, the truth came out, and it was handled the way such things should be, through the proper people, so no other family would be deceived the way ours was.
Grace has more love in her life now, not less. A mother who raised her and a birth mother who never stopped looking. She learned the one thing every adopted child deserves to know for certain. She was never given away lightly. She was fought for, by two women, her whole life.