The waiting changed the way I thought about my sister.
Before Ellie arrived, I had watched Nora struggle for years.
I had seen her try to remain hopeful after disappointment.
I had listened when she admitted that she was afraid she would never become a mother.
I had held her hand while she considered adoption.
When she finally met Ellie, I had felt genuine happiness for her.
I still did.
But now I could see how much had been built during those two weeks.
Nora and Tom had welcomed a child into their home.
They had begun learning her habits.
They had started building the ordinary routines that make a family feel like a family.
Ellie had begun calling Nora and Tom her parents.
She had begun calling me Auntie Claire.
None of that was imaginary.
It was happening every day, whether the test had arrived or not.
I thought about it whenever I felt myself becoming consumed by the question of Lucy.
I had spent five years mourning my daughter.
If Ellie really was Lucy, then I had lost five years with her.
That thought was almost unbearable.
But Nora had spent eight years hoping for a child, and Ellie had only just entered her life.
I couldn't look at my sister's happiness and think it counted for less because of what the records might reveal.
Love wasn't a competition.
It wasn't something one of us had to surrender so the other could keep it.
I reminded myself of that whenever resentment threatened to appear.
There were moments when I felt anger.
I was angry that the records were uncertain.
I was angry that I had been given news in a hospital and had trusted it for years without question.
I was angry that a little girl could be at the center of a mystery she was too young to understand.
But I wasn't angry with Nora for adopting Ellie.
She had followed the information she was given.
She had wanted to give a child a home.
She had done what I had encouraged her to consider years earlier.
I couldn't blame her for that.
One afternoon, I visited again.
I had hesitated before going.
I worried that I might look at Ellie and see only the questions surrounding her.
I worried that Nora might feel she had to watch every word she said around me.
Neither of us needed that.
So I went because I wanted to see them.
Nora opened the door.
She looked tired, but she smiled when she saw me.
"Come in."
I stepped inside and heard Ellie talking in the next room.
A moment later, she appeared.
She ran toward me with the same excitement she had shown the previous week.
"Auntie Claire!"
I bent down to greet her.
She hugged me, then pulled away and looked at my hands.
"Did you bring my ribbons?"
I laughed softly.
"Not today."
Her face fell for half a second.
Then she shrugged.
"That's okay."
The ease with which she accepted the answer touched me.
She wasn't asking for anything complicated.
She wanted a familiar little thing from someone she trusted.
I sat with her for a while.
She talked about what she had been doing, and I listened.
I asked a few questions.
She answered some and ignored others, as children do when their thoughts have already moved somewhere else.
There was no mystery in the way she spoke.
No hint that she knew anything about the questions troubling the adults around her.
She was simply Ellie.
I wanted to remember her that way.
When she went to join Tom, Nora sat beside me.
She had made tea.
The cup was warm in my hands, but I barely drank any of it.
Nora watched me for a moment.
"Are you still frightened?"
I looked at the tea.
"Yes."
She nodded.
"So am I."
I wanted to tell her that she had nothing to fear.
But I couldn't promise that.
I didn't know what the results would show or what the next steps would require.
I couldn't offer certainty when I had none.
Instead, I said, "Whatever we learn, we need to be careful with Ellie."
Nora looked toward the room where Tom and Ellie were talking.
"I know."
"She's only five. She hasn't asked for any of this."
"No, she hasn't."
Nora wrapped both hands around her cup.
"I keep thinking about the day we brought her home."
I listened.
"I thought the hardest part was over. We'd waited so long, and finally we could just be a family."
She looked down.
"Now I feel as though I'm waiting all over again."
I understood that more than she knew.
The waiting had become familiar to both of us, though for different reasons.
For Nora, it was the fear that something might threaten the family she had finally found.
For me, it was the fear that the truth might overturn everything I believed about the child I had lost.
Neither of us wanted to hurt the other.
Neither of us knew what to expect.
I put my cup down.
"Nora, you are her mother in every way that matters to the life you've shared with her so far."
My sister looked up sharply.
"I don't want you to say that because you're trying to make me feel better."
"I'm not."
I held her gaze.
"You love her. You've cared for her. She's been calling you Mommy. None of that disappears because we need answers about her past."
Nora's eyes filled again.
She nodded, but she didn't speak.
I reached across the table and held her hand.
For a while, we sat that way.
I thought about the advice I had given her years earlier.
Being a mother wasn't only about giving birth.
I had said it because I believed it.
Now I understood that those words might become important to both of us in ways neither of us could have imagined.
If Ellie was Lucy, I would have to face the fact that my daughter had a life I had never known about.
I would have to make room for the years I had missed without pretending they hadn't mattered.
Nora would have to face the possibility that the adoption had begun with an incomplete history.
But Ellie would still need love.
She would still need the adults around her to put her needs first.
And she would still need time to grow into the person she was becoming.
We couldn't make decisions for her based only on our own pain.
I knew that much.
When I left, Nora hugged me at the door.
She held on tightly.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you, too."
We didn't add anything else.
There was no sentence that could make the uncertainty disappear.
I drove home thinking about the difference between truth and blame.
The truth might show that something terrible had happened.
It might reveal that the story I had been told was wrong.
But it wouldn't automatically tell us who had known what, or why things had unfolded as they had.
We would need facts before we could understand any of that.
I had learned to live with grief by accepting that I couldn't change the past.
Now I was learning that accepting the past was not the same as knowing it.
The independent test would give us another piece of information.
It might answer one question.
It might raise others.
Whatever happened next, I wanted to face it without turning against the people I loved.
I wanted to protect Ellie.
I wanted Nora to know that I wasn't her enemy.
And I wanted the truth about Lucy, even if the truth took away the only explanation I had ever been given.
For the first time, I understood that these wishes did not have to compete.
They could all be true at once.
I had no idea yet what the test would say.
But I knew I would no longer pretend that the questions didn't matter.
Click here to continue reading: PART 9: The Longer We Waited for Confirmation, the More I Realized That Knowing Ellie Was Mine Would Not Explain Where My Baby Had Gone
My Sister Came to My Kitchen With an Envelope, and the First Thing She Said Made Me Fear the Worst
Part 8 of 12
