I felt a small, hot anger unfold inside me on my mother’s behalf.
“She wasn’t like that.”
“No,” Adrian said softly. “She wasn’t.”
His gaze dropped to my stomach.
“He offered her money to disappear. She refused. Then he threatened her immigration status, her work, her family back in Europe. I didn’t know the full extent of it then. I knew he disapproved. I knew he was cruel. But I didn’t know what he had done until years later.”
“Years later,” I repeated.
He accepted the weight of that. “Yes.”
A tear slid silently down his cheek, and he did not wipe it away.
“My father told me Sofia had taken money and left voluntarily. He showed me documents. A signed statement. A bank transfer. I believed just enough of it to be angry, and not enough of it to stop loving her. By the time I realized the documents were manufactured, she had vanished.”
