She remembered pressure to process the matter quickly.
She remembered a man insisting his wife was too ill to be questioned.
She remembered concerns that had been dismissed.
And she remembered a payment.
Twenty-eight thousand dollars.
Mark had received money connected to the placement.
When Miriam told me, I felt physically ill.
He hadn’t merely surrendered our child without my consent.
He had benefited financially from the arrangement.
The figure made the betrayal unbearable.
Twenty-eight thousand dollars.
For twenty-eight years of stolen motherhood.
I thought about the tiny memorial we’d held.
The white flowers.
The empty space beside me where I’d imagined our daughter’s coffin should have been.
Mark had stood with his arm around me while I cried.
He had whispered that God needed our little girl more than we did.
He had watched me kneel beside an urn that contained no remains belonging to her.
