They Chose Her Over Me In Two Lives Chapter 06
At first, Mom was furious.
She pounded on the door with the flat of her hand, each strike echoing down the empty hallway.
“Lily! Even if you’re throwing a tantrum, you can’t refuse to open the door for your parents! Is that how they taught you manners at the group home?!”
Her voice cracked against the walls, sharp and brittle. But there was no answer. Not a whisper. Not a
creak. Nothing.
She tried again. And again. Her knuckles went red. Her throat went raw.
Finally, something cold curled through her chest. She turned and called for Dad and Ryan, her voice
thinner now, less certain.
They found the spare key quickly enough. Ryan had it in his hand within seconds, jaw tight, fingers fumbling at the lock.
The moment the door swung open, all three of them were still praying I was just sulking inside. Still
hoping I was curled up on the narrow cot, arms crossed, face turned away, waiting to be coaxed out.
But the storage room was empty.
Stripped bare, almost. The shelves still held their smell of dust and old cardboard. The narrow bed
was untouched. The silence pressed in from every corner like something alive.
Mom’s eyes welled up instantly. Her lips trembled, and she pressed one hand to her mouth as if to
hold something in.
“She… she didn’t come home all night,” she whispered. “With rain this heavy, where could that child have gone?”
Ryan didn’t say a word. He just dragged his fingers through his hair, again and again, until it stood
up in wild tufts. His jaw worked, but no sound came out.
Dad stayed relatively calm. He crossed the room and gently patted Mom’s hand, his voice low and steady, the way he always sounded when he was trying to hold a room together.
“She has nowhere else to go. She must have gone back to the group home. Don’t worry–Lily’s been on her own since she was little. She’s been through worse.”
Then he stopped.
His voice trailed off into the quiet.
He suddenly felt ashamed. The words hung in the air like smoke, and he couldn’t take them back.
They knew exactly how much I’d suffered. Every year of it. Every cold meal. Every door that had
closed in my face.
But every time they had to choose between Jade and me, they forgot. Without even realizing it. The
forgetting was so smooth, so practiced, it had become a reflex.
The room went quiet and heavy.
Finally, Mom couldn’t hold it in anymore. She started crying–real, ugly crying—and grabbed her
phone to call Mrs. Walsh. Her fingers slipped twice on the screen before she got the number right.
Before the call could connect, a housekeeper rushed in. Jade was having another attack.
The three of them snapped to attention. Just like that. Like a switch had been flipped.
Mom gritted her teeth and put the phone down.
“Once we’ve calmed Jade down, we’ll go pick Lily up from the group home. We’ll make it up to her.
She’ll still want to come home with us.”
Dad and Ryan nodded immediately.
But they thought I was still at the group home.
By then, I was already on the other side of the ocean.
My adoptive parents were a kind Chinese–American couple. They’d been unable to conceive for
years. So they decided to adopt.
On the adoption list, my adoptive mother said she’d picked me out right away. She said it was something about my eyes–quiet, watchful, like I’d already learned not to expect too much.
She gently took my hand and showed me around the house. Room by room. Soft light, clean floors, a window that looked out onto a small garden.
I asked carefully, “Will any other kids sleep in my room? I sleep really deeply. I might bother
them.”
The couple froze.
My adoptive father explained quickly, “No. We’re not adopting or having another child.”
He even told me that once he’d made up his mind to adopt me, he’d gotten a vasectomy.
To them, raising a child meant giving that child their whole heart.
Their whole heart.
No one had ever said that to me before.
I didn’t know what it meant.
But when I heard it, my heart pounded.
That gray, dead place inside me seemed to take on color.
My adoptive parents didn’t rush me. They didn’t demand I call them Mom and Dad right away. They
treated me like a friend–warm, patient, unhurried.
In less than one night, I let down most of my guard.
For the first time, I learned something.
When you’re wrapped in love, you don’t have to worry about making mistakes. You don’t have to
worry that love will be taken away.
That night, I lay beside my adoptive mother and listened to her read me a bedtime story. Her voice was soft, steady, soothing in a way I’d never known.
When I closed my eyes, I couldn’t help but whisper, “Mom.”
I’d never dared to say it out loud at the Hayes house.
Because Jade would make a scene.
And
my parents and Ryan would look at me with reproach.
“We’re already trying to calm Jade down. Why do you have to provoke her?”
I never understood. Why, because of her, I didn’t even have the right to call my mother “Mom.”
But now, I didn’t have to worry about that anymore.
