"No."
"Why?"
"My parents did not allow us to talk about it. Lynette knew of course. She was six and I was five when my biological dad dumped me with his brother."
"What about Joyce?"
"She figured it out when she was a teenager, not long before we met."
"She never treated you any different."
"No, she didn't." Which was why her sister making Carlo her child's guardian with no mention of Annette hurt so much. "She always acted like I was her sister and that was that."
"She didn't make Lynette Jo-Jo's guardian either," Carlo pointed out, like he knew what she was thinking.
"Can you imagine? Lynette doesn't have a nurturing bone in her body. She's never made any bones about the fact she does not crave motherhood."
"That is not what she implied to me."
"She wanted to hook you."
"It did not work."
"No." And Annette felt a great deal of satisfaction at that truth.
"You kept an important truth about yourself from me. No wonder everything fell apart five years ago."
"I didn't back out of the wedding because I am adopted."
"Didn't you? Are you saying the insecurity you felt with your family did not contribute to you walking away from me?"
Annette opened her mouth, but no words came out. She couldn't deny that because she now knew that feeling unworthy of her family's lovehadbeen part of why she'd run away so far and so fast. She'd been certain he needed perfection and she'd never lived up to that with her family. How could she with him?
But had he needed her to be his perfect wife? Or had she played a part five years ago that somewhere deep inside she knew she couldn't keep playing for a lifetime?
Cinderella.
A woman who had been her family's perpetual servant and was destined to be an extension of her future husband rather than his partner.
"It was a secret," she reminded him now, rather than acknowledge the truth of his words out loud. "I wasn't supposed to tell anyone. Ever."
"You were going to marry me," he pointed out, like that mattered.
"I was ashamed." She hadn't realized that until therapy, but it helped Annette understand why she found it so easy to think everything was her fault.
"Of being adopted?"
She didn't answer for several seconds, looking for the words that hadn't come easily even in the therapist's office. "Of being unwanted. Unworthy of my father's love, of not being enough to inspire love in my adoptive parents."
"But your father's lack and frankly the lack of your parents now is not your fault."
"After three years of therapy, I mostly know that, but the feeling of shame is a hard one to shake. I work on it every day, reminding myself that my birth father didn't give me up because there was something wrong with me, but because he lacked something inside himself that allowed him to give up his five-year-old daughter without a backward glance."
"He was an ass."
She laughed, but privately agreed. Looking back at how her adoptive parents had treated her, she wasn't too impressed with their nurturing instincts either. Whatever their reasons for always finding the fault, the actual fault hadn't been in who she was, but who they wanted her to be.
The next morning, Annette peed on the stick and then stared at it in shock for several minutes before a knock sounded on the bathroom door.