Chapter 2
“She is my mother.”
Four words.
Grayson said them while looking directly at me.
I covered my mouth. I had promised myself I would stay composed in that courtroom. I had sat through lawyers discussing my son as though his life were a place to move him. Those four words undid me.
Valerie lowered her eyes.
Grayson turned back to the judge.
“I want to know Valerie,” he said. “I have questions for her. But I live with my mom. I want to stay there.”
The judge thanked him. She asked whether he understood that Valerie was asking to change where he lived until he turned eighteen.
“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”
“And you’ve had time to think about what you want?”
“I’ve thought about it every day since she came.”
He sat down. I wanted to reach for him, but I let him have the space he had asked for.
The hearing did not end with an instant ruling. The judge said she would review the records and hear more about the old guardianship order. My lawyer, Angela Price, had warned me that might happen. Knowing it was possible did nothing to calm me when we left.
Outside the courthouse, reporters waited near the steps. Valerie’s name had drawn them. Angela guided us through a side exit, but one man called after Grayson.
“Do you want a relationship with your birth mother?”
Grayson kept walking. In the car, he pressed his forehead against the window.
“You didn’t have to speak today,” I told him.
“I wanted to.”
“You did well.”
“I meant it.”
“I know.”
He turned toward me. “Why are you crying?”
“Because I heard you.”
He leaned across the console and hugged me. He had to bend awkwardly because he was nearly a foot taller than I was. I held him the way I had held him in the hallway seventeen years earlier.
At home, Mrs. Delgado had left soup on our doorstep. She had moved out of our old building years ago, but she still lived close enough to bring food whenever she thought I might forget to eat.
Grayson carried the pot inside.
“Did you tell her what happened?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“She’ll call before dinner.”
She called twelve minutes later. Grayson answered and told her his four words. I heard her begin to cry through the phone.
After we ate, Angela called. Valerie’s attorneys had asked for another hearing focused on the gaps in Grayson’s early records. They said their client had been unable to find him because a family member had misled her.
“That’s different from what she told us,” I said.
“It is,” Angela replied. “We need to understand exactly what happened.”
Valerie had said she left him because she was afraid. Now her lawyers seemed to be saying someone kept them apart. Both could be true, but Grayson deserved a clear account.
I told him about the request. He listened without interrupting.
“Does she say she tried to find me?” he asked.
“Her lawyers say she was misled.”
“By who?”
“We don’t know yet.”
He took out his phone and opened the message Valerie had sent after their first meeting. He read it aloud.
I thought about you every birthday. I hope someday you will understand the choices I made.
“She didn’t say she looked,” he said.
“No.”
“I’ll ask her.”
He wrote a short message asking whether she had searched for him. Before he sent it, he showed me.
“You don’t need my permission to ask her about your life,” I said.
“I wanted you to know.”
He sent it. Neither of us slept much.
The next morning, Valerie replied. She said her father had told her the baby was taken into care and that contact would only hurt him. She said she had believed him for years. When her father died, she found a folder with a name and an address.
Grayson read the message twice.
“She knew I was alive,” he said. “She just listened to him.”
He went to school because he had an exam. I watched him walk through the entrance with his backpack over one shoulder. He looked like every other teenager arriving late to class. I wanted the day to be ordinary for him.
At noon, Angela called again. She had obtained a copy of a letter from seventeen years earlier. It had been addressed to the agency handling Grayson’s case and signed by Valerie Sutton.
May you like
Valerie’s lawyers said her father had written it and forged her name.
The letter was the first evidence we had that someone connected to Grayson had contacted the agency before his first birthday.
