I hesitated. Part of me felt like I had seen enough. Part of me knew I hadn’t.
I clicked play.
Grandma appeared on the screen, looking older than in the other videos. This was recent, maybe only months before she died.
“Mila,” she began, “there’s something I never told you about why Karen left.”
My breath caught.
“You were seven years old. Karen had met Richard. He was wealthy then, or at least he seemed to be. He didn’t want to raise another man’s child.”
That much I knew, or thought I did.
“But that wasn’t the real reason.”
Grandma’s voice trembled.
“The real reason was that Karen told me you ruined her life. That if she hadn’t gotten pregnant at twenty-five, she could have been someone, done something.”
The words hit like physical blows.
“She wanted to leave you with me, but she wanted compensation.”
Grandma gave a bitter little laugh. “My own daughter asked me to pay her to give up her child.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“I agreed. I paid her fifty thousand dollars, and I swore I would never tell you.”
Tears ran down Grandma’s cheeks.
“But you deserve the truth, Mila. Karen didn’t just abandon you. She sold you.”
The video ended.
I sat in the silence of that hidden room, trying to process what I had just learned.
My mother had not just left me behind. She had literally put a price tag on me, and Grandma had paid it to keep me.
Two weeks later, Aunt Patricia came to visit.
I was in the garden – Grandma’s garden – pulling weeds from the rose beds. The spring sun was warm on my face, and for the first time in nearly two years, I felt something like peace.
Patricia’s car rolled into the driveway. She got out slowly, holding a small box.
“Mila, do you have a minute?”
I stood, brushing dirt from my knees. “Of course.”
We sat on the patio with glasses of iced tea sweating in the afternoon heat. Patricia kept touching the box in her lap as if it might escape if she let go.
“I need to tell you something,” she said finally. “Something I should have told you years ago.”
“Okay.”
She opened the box.
Inside was a bundle of envelopes yellowed with age. Maybe thirty or forty of them.
