“You received it anonymously.”
“Why anonymously?”
“Because I knew you would refuse it if you knew where it came from.”
“You had no right to decide what I accepted.”
“I know that now.”
The words sounded familiar, but coming from Victoria they seemed almost impossible.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Because I thought I was preserving your future.”
“My future was three years of not knowing my children existed.”
“I believed you would eventually be grateful.”
The sentence was so painfully like my mother that I almost recognized the woman she had been trying to become beneath it.
“Did you tell Evelyn I wanted nothing to do with the children?”
“I told her you had not asked about them.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
Victoria exhaled slowly.
“I told her you had not made a decision.”
“That still wasn’t the question.”
“I told her that if she returned to Chicago, the children would be pulled into a life neither of you could control.”
