PART 2
“The adoption papers,” Renee said. “The ones that say she isn’t yours anymore.”
My knees almost gave out on that terrace.
“I never signed anything.”
Silence. Then Renee’s voice changed completely.
“Your mother told me you were giving her up. That you couldn’t cope. That you wanted it done quietly, at the wedding, so you wouldn’t have to say goodbye.”
“That’s a lie. Where are you?”
“Pulling over,” she said. “Right now. Tell me where to go.”
I stayed on the line until two Sonoma County deputies reached her in a gas station lot near Healdsburg.
Mae was asleep in her car seat.
Forty-one minutes after my mother took her from my arms, a deputy put my daughter back in them.
I didn’t let go for the rest of the night.
Renee sat on the curb and cried. She showed the deputies everything she had.
A copy of a “consent to adoption.” My name typed at the bottom. A signature that looked almost exactly like mine.
And a notary stamp.
The notary was my sister.
Courtney has been a notary for her real estate office for four years.
Then the deputy read me the names of the “adoptive parents.”
Warren and Stacy Holt.
Courtney’s new brother-in-law. The groom’s older brother and his wife.
They’d been trying for a baby for six years.
My mother had promised them mine.
The Holts had paid her $60,000 for “medical expenses and the birth mother’s recovery.”
I never saw a dollar of it. It paid for Courtney’s dress, the string quartet, and the open bar.
The deputies walked into the reception during the father-of-the-bride toast.
My dad stopped mid-sentence.
My mother was taken out in handcuffs past two hundred guests. She was still holding her champagne flute until a deputy took it from her.
Courtney screamed that I had ruined her wedding.
Her new husband, Brent, didn’t scream. He just looked at his brother across the room.
“You paid for a baby?” he said. “From my wife’s family?”
Warren couldn’t look at him.
Later, I learned the papers were never legal anyway. In California, a birth mother has to sign adoption consent in front of a state social worker. A notary stamp means nothing.
My mother knew that.
She was counting on me being too tired, too ashamed, and too alone to fight.
She was wrong about the last one.
My mother was charged with child abduction and fraud. Courtney lost her notary commission and her job.
Brent filed for an annulment eleven days after the wedding.
The Holts never got their $60,000 back. Stacy sent me a letter anyway. She said she was sorry. She said she should have asked why a grandmother was selling a baby her daughter was still nursing.
I believe her.
Renee calls me every few months. She’s still a baby nurse. Now she asks for both parents’ signatures before every job.
Mae is two now. She runs everywhere. She sings to the dog.
And her diaper bag still has an AirTag in the front pocket.
It always will.
THE END.
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The people who say “family first” aren’t always talking about your family.
If you were Lindsey, would you ever let your mother see Mae again? Tell us in the replies.