“And that stopped you from telling me for twenty-one years?”
He had no answer that mattered.
Austin spoke then, his voice low and steady despite everything. “Are you saying… you’re my mother?”
Tears blurred my vision. “I think I am.”
He looked down at the blanket in his hands.
“Can you prove it?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said immediately. “Records, DNA, whatever you need. But you need to know this first. I didn’t give you away. I was told you died.”
He absorbed that in silence.
“My parents always said my birth mother was very young,” he said after a moment. “That she left this for me, but no name. No way to find her.”
“They didn’t know,” my father added quietly. “They were lied to as well.”
Austin did not look at him.
He looked at me.
“You made this?” he asked, lifting the blanket slightly.
I nodded. “Every stitch.”
He ran his thumb over one of the yellow birds, as if testing the reality of it.
“I always wondered,” he said softly.
“I made them yellow because I thought bright things might make storms less scary,” I said before I could stop myself.
He blinked. “I still hate storms.”
The weight of that nearly broke me.
