I never met my father, and my mother rarely visited. Much later, I learned from the caretakers how I had come to live in the orphanage. I was around a year old when I caught a dreadful chillpneumonia, they said. Worn down by illness, I simply stopped crying altogether. For several days I lay silent in my cot, quietly slipping away as my melancholy mother sipped gin in the next room.
I was born into a family governed by my mothers love for drink. She would spend days lost in bottles, and the rattling of her glasses was the soundtrack to my sleepless nights. The neighbours had grown impatient with my wailing, so one day my mother marched me off to the hospital. When the nurse came to examine me, she found me alightmy clothes were ablaze with silent flames, so vivid yet unreal. It took three figures drifting into the room to quench the fire. They whisked me away to the emergency ward, tending to my scorched skin. My mother did not come to see me even once.
The strange sort of peace I found at the orphanage followed me long after the birth of my first child. Life granted me an education, a fine job, and a sprawling flat filled with curious, delicate decorations. I found unexpected delight living there, as if my soul basked in the warmth of a borrowed family. We treated miracles like everyday affairs in our patchwork clan, except for one absence: we longed for a child of our own.
My husband and I decided to adopt a little girl of two from the orphanage, despite advice from friends and family to do otherwise. But their voices faded, scattered by the surreality of our determination. We brought her with us when we moved to London, unconcerned by the distant threat of some lurking hereditary complaint. She has been absolutely healthy ever since.
Every day, I thank my lucky stars for trusting my own mind and not surrendering to the warnings of others. None of the dire prophecies from the doctors came truemy child thrives and grows. Too often people blame fate or bad blood for a childs difficulties, as if refusing the idea that care and environment might shape them more than mysterious ancestry. In truth, a child needs only love and the feeling that they are necessary in order to blossom.
Now the fifth anniversary of our adoption draws near, and I find myself deeply unsettled. I love my son as fiercely as my other child, who came to me by birththey are both my heart. A shadow of unease passes over me; I fear that Harriet might learn she was adopted and react harshly. How will I speak to her about it, should she discover the truth? Will she understand? That dread, more than anything, haunts meworse even than the possibility that someone else might tell her before I do.
