Life was never easy, not in any of the years that followed, but we had each other in a way I don’t think any of us ever took for granted.
We started a tradition early on — one photo, every year, on the anniversary of the day I filed the adoption paperwork, all four of us lined up against the same living room wall so we could watch, year after year, exactly how much we’d all changed.
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Twenty of those photos hang in a hallway of my house now, in order, from three babies too small to sit up on their own beside a twenty-three-year-old who had no idea what he was doing, all the way to three twenty-year-old women standing beside a man well into his forties.
Our mother never once reached out in all that time. Some years, especially the busy ones, I genuinely forgot the girls were my sisters and not my daughters. It stopped mattering which word technically applied a long time before this past June.
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This past June, on my birthday, all three of them came home the same evening, the way they always did.
Usually, that meant arguing loudly the second they walked through the door over whose bakery had made the better cake that year, a running joke that had somehow survived two decades without ever getting old.
This year, they barely spoke at all.
Nora didn’t say a word through the entire dinner I’d made. Piper’s eyes were swollen, red-rimmed in a way makeup hadn’t quite managed to cover. Wren wouldn’t look at me directly, not once, the whole meal.
“What happened?” I finally asked, setting my fork down. “Something’s wrong. All three of you, talk to me.”
