“There was this young girl at the hospital,” Richard continued, his eyes fixed on the floor. “Seventeen, scared, and wanted to give her baby up for adoption. Our doctor… he suggested an arrangement. Said it would be better if you never knew about losing the baby. That we could give this child… I mean, give Eric… a loving home, and you’d never have to know the pain…”
“No,” Linda shook her head violently. “No, no, no. I would remember. I would KNOW if I’d lost a baby!”
Linda just sat there as tears streamed down her cheeks.
“I wanted to tell you so many times,” Richard whispered. “But as the years passed, it seemed impossible. You loved Eric so much and were so proud to be his mother…”
“All these years,” Linda’s voice was barely audible. “All these years, you let me believe… you let me…”
She turned to Eric. “Did you… did you hate me? When you found out?”
Eric knelt in front of her chair. “No, Mom. I was angry at first, yes. But not at you. Never at you. You’re still my mother. You’re the one who raised me. But what you did to Amy and Noah… that wasn’t you. That was fear talking. Fear of losing another child, even if you didn’t remember losing the first one.”
At that point, Linda completely broke down.
Eric held her as she sobbed, and for the first time, I saw her not as my manipulative mother-in-law, but as a woman who’d had her whole reality shattered.
Weeks passed before Linda was ready to face us again. When she did, Richard took us to a small, hidden corner of the local cemetery. There, beneath an old oak tree, stood a tiny gravestone with no name.
