I am 75 years old. My name is Margaret.
My husband, Thomas, and I have been married for more than fifty years.
For most of those years, it was just the two of us.
We wanted children more than anything. We tried for years. I went through test after test. Hormones. Appointments. Waiting rooms that smelled like disinfectant and hope. Every month felt like a promise and a disappointment wrapped together.
One afternoon, a doctor sat across from us and folded his hands on the desk. He didn’t look rushed. That made it worse.
“Your chances are extremely low,” he said gently. “I’m so sorry.”
That was it.
No miracle.
No new plan.
No, “Let’s try one more thing.”
Just an ending.
We told ourselves we had made peace with it. We grieved quietly. Then we adjusted. By the time we turned fifty, we said it out loud to each other: We’re okay.
We weren’t dreaming anymore.
Then one afternoon, our neighbor, Mrs. Collins, stopped me by the mailbox.
“There’s a little girl at the children’s home,” she said casually. “She’s been there since birth.”
I paused. “Since birth?”
“Five years,” Mrs. Collins said. “No one comes back. People call, ask for a photo, then disappear.”
“Why?” I asked.
Mrs. Collins lowered her voice. “She has a large birthmark on her face. Covers most of one side. People see it and decide it’s too hard.”
My chest tightened.
“She’s been waiting her whole life,” Mrs. Collins added.
That sentence followed me home.
That night, I brought it up to Thomas. I expected him to say we were too old. Too settled. Too late.
Instead, he listened quietly.
“You can’t stop thinking about her,” he said.
“I can’t,” I admitted. “She’s been waiting her whole life.”
“We’re not young,” he said carefully. “If we do this, we’ll be in our seventies by the time she’s grown.”
“I know.”
“And there’s money, energy, school, college,” he added. “We try not to build expectations we can’t meet.”
“I know,” I said again.
There was a long silence between us. Then Thomas spoke.
“Do you want to meet her?” he asked. “Just meet her. No promises.”
Two days later, we walked into the children’s home.
A social worker led us down a hallway and into a small playroom.
“She knows she’s meeting visitors,” the social worker said. “We didn’t tell her more. We try not to build expectations we can’t meet.”
At a tiny table sat a little girl, carefully coloring inside the lines. Her dress was a little too big, like it had been passed down too many times.
She looked up and asked, very seriously,
“Are you old?”
The birthmark covered most of the left side of her face. It was dark and impossible to miss. But her eyes were sharp and watchful, like she had learned early how to read adults before trusting them.
I knelt beside her. “Hi, Lily. I’m Margaret.”
She glanced at the social worker, then back at me.
“Hi,” she whispered.
Thomas squeezed himself into a child-sized chair across from her. “I’m Thomas.”
She studied him closely.
“Are you old?” she asked again.
He smiled. “Older than you.”
“Will you die soon?” she asked, completely serious.
My stomach dropped.
Thomas didn’t flinch.
“Not if I can help it,” he said. “I plan to be a problem for a long time.”
A small smile slipped out before she caught it. Then she went back to coloring.
She answered questions politely but didn’t offer much. She kept glancing at the door, like she was timing how long we’d stay.
The paperwork took months.
In the car afterward, I said, “I want her.”
Thomas nodded. “Me too.”
The paperwork took months.
The day it became official, Lily walked out holding a backpack and a worn stuffed rabbit. She held the rabbit by one ear, like it might disappear if she didn’t grip it just right.
When we pulled into our driveway, she asked,
“Is this really my house now?”
“Yes,” I said.
“For how long?”
Thomas turned slightly in his seat.
“For always. We’re your parents.”
She looked between us.
“Even if people stare at me?”
“People stare because they’re rude,” I told her. “Not because you’re wrong. Your face doesn’t embarrass us. Not ever.”
She nodded once, like she was storing the information away for later—waiting for the moment we’d change our minds.
The first week, she asked permission for everything.
“Can I sit here?”
“Can I drink water?”
“Can I use the bathroom?”
“Can I turn on the light?”
It was like she was trying to be small enough to keep.
On the third day, I sat her down.
“This is your home,” I told her. “You don’t have to ask to exist.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“What if I do something bad?” she whispered. “Will you send me back?”
“No,” I said firmly. “You might get in trouble. You might lose TV. But you won’t be sent back. You’re ours.”
She nodded, but she watched us for weeks, waiting.
School was rough.
One afternoon, she got into the car with red eyes and her backpack clutched like a shield.
“A boy called me ‘monster face,’” she muttered. “Everyone laughed.”
I pulled the car over.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You are not a monster. Anyone who says that is wrong. Not you. Them.”
She touched her cheek.
“I wish it would go away.”
“I know,” I said. “And I hate that it hurts. But I don’t wish you were different.”
We never hid that she was adopted.
“You grew in another woman’s belly,” I told her, “and in our hearts.”
When she was thirteen, she asked,
“Do you know anything about my other mom?”
“We know she was very young,” I said. “She left no name or letter. That’s all we were told.”
“So she just left me?”
“I don’t think you forget a baby you carried,” I said.
“Do you think she ever thinks about me?”
“I think she does,” I answered. “I don’t think you forget a baby you carried.”
As she grew older, she learned to answer people without shrinking.
“It’s a birthmark,” she’d say.
“No, it doesn’t hurt.”
“Yes, I’m fine. Are you?”
At sixteen, she announced,
“I want to be a doctor.”
“That’s a long road,” Thomas said.
“I know.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I like science,” she said, “and I want kids who feel different to see someone like me and know they’re not broken.”
She studied hard. College. Medical school. Setbacks. Long nights. She never gave up.
By the time she graduated, we were slowing down. More pills on the counter. More naps. More doctor appointments of our own.
Then the letter came.
A plain white envelope. No stamp. No return address. Just “Margaret” written neatly on the front.
Inside were three pages.
“Dear Margaret,” it began. “My name is Emily. I am Lily’s biological mother.”
Emily wrote she was seventeen. Her parents were strict and controlling.
“When Lily was born,” she wrote, “they saw the birthmark and called it a punishment.”
“They refused to let me bring her home,” she wrote. “They said no one would ever want a baby who looked like that.”
She said they pressured her into signing adoption papers at the hospital.
“So I signed,” she wrote. “But I did not stop loving her.”
Emily wrote that when Lily was three, she visited the children’s home and watched her through a window.
“I was too ashamed to go in,” she wrote. “When I came back later, she had been adopted by an older couple. They told me you looked kind.”
On the last page, she wrote,
“I am sick now. Cancer. I don’t know how much time I have. I am not writing to take Lily back. I only want her to know she was wanted.”
Thomas read it and said,
“We tell her. It’s her story.”
Lily came straight over, still in scrubs.
She read the letter silently. One tear fell onto the paper.
“She was seventeen,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And her parents did that.”
“Yes.”
“I thought she dumped me because of my face,” Lily said quietly. “It wasn’t that simple.”
“No,” I said. “It rarely is.”
“You and Thomas are my parents,” she said. “That doesn’t change.”
She met Emily a week later.
“I was scared,” Emily said.
“I know,” Lily replied.
“I was wrong,” Emily said. “I’m sorry.”
“I thought I’d be furious,” Lily said. “Mostly I’m sad.”
“Me too,” Emily whispered.
On the drive home, Lily cried.
“I thought meeting her would fix something,” she sobbed.
“The truth doesn’t always fix things,” I said. “Sometimes it just ends the wondering.”
Now, Lily doesn’t call herself unwanted anymore.
She knows she was wanted twice.
By a scared teenager who couldn’t fight her parents.
And by two people who heard about “the girl no one wants”
and knew that was a lie.