The photo frame on my nightstand is face down. I can’t bear to look at it. It’s a picture of Lily at her high school graduation, wearing the cap and gown I ironed, smiling at the woman who packed her lunch every day for twelve years.
I met Lily when she was two. She was a shy, stumbling toddler holding a sippy cup. I raised his daughter from the time she was a toddler. I wasn’t just a weekend figure; I was the one who was there for the nightmares and the fevers.
I braided her hair, bandaged her knees, and cried at her graduation.
I taught her how to drive. I sat up with her when she got her first heart broken. I was “Mom” in every way that matters, except on the birth certificate. I thought that was enough. I thought love was a contract that couldn’t be voided.
Then came the divorce. It was ugly, filled with shouting matches and asset division. But I never worried about Lily. She was seventeen. She was mine.
Then, the phone calls stopped. My texts went unanswered.
I confronted Mark in the driveway while he was loading the last of his boxes.
“Where is she?” I demanded. “Why won’t she talk to me?”
He looked at me with a smirk that chilled my blood. He held the ultimate trump card, and he was finally playing it.
“When we divorced, he told her she wasn’t allowed to see me anymore,” I realized, seeing the triumph in his eyes.
“She’s confused,” I pleaded. “Mark, don’t do this to her. I’m her mother.”
He laughed. “‘She’s not your real mom,’” he quoted himself, recounting what he had drilled into her head.
He had used biology as a weapon. He had convinced a confused teenager that my fifteen years of devotion were just a performance, and that without the genetic link, I was nothing more than her father’s ex-girlfriend.
He divorced me, but he orphaned her from the only mother she knew.
I stand in the empty room that used to be hers, realizing the magnitude of his spite. To hurt me, he was willing to break his own daughter’s heart. He didn’t just end a marriage; he erased a childhood, leaving both of us grieving a death where no one actually died.
