Page 85 - The Letter By Ann Newhouse

had a fiancée and they were getting married in a few months. I was utterly devastated’.
I could almost feel how painful this recollection was for her.
‘I refused to terminate the pregnancy and so we hatched a plan. I was to persuade my parents to let me go on a working trip to Spain with a group from college we’d be gone about 6 months. It took a lot of persuasion and I made sure to keep my grades high giving them no excuse to say no, eventually they agreed and helped fund it too. But instead of going to Spain I was to go to his friend’s house in Scotland where I would deliver the baby and it would be given up for adoption. He arranged everything, and I just went along I had convinced myself that as soon as the baby was born he would instantly fall in love with both of us. I was very naive’, a single tear seeped down her cheek, ‘I left my baby with strangers 35 years ago I had a beautiful daughter, I named her Millie’.
I was a little speechless she had endured so much and kept in inside her for so long. ‘Oh, Penny I’m so sorry for you’, I hugged as she sobbed both of us sobbing now. Drying her tears, she said, ‘when you arrived on my doorstep it felt like my daughter had come home I felt that connection’.
‘Probably when I told you about me being an orphan.’ I tried to convince her. ‘No, no’ shaking her head, ‘I felt it the minute you walked in the door’.
‘Do you think I could be your daughter?’ the realization took me by surprise.
‘No Millie would be a little older any way I left her in Scotland,’ but she looked a little unsure.
‘Maybe that’s why she hasn’t tried to find you, maybe she was taken out of the country’, from the look on her face I realized too late that it wasn’t something she had considered before.