“It would ruin everything we have built,” Rita declared, her jaw locked tight, as if she had constructed an empire rather than a three-bedroom colonial and a country club membership.
She stood up abruptly, marched to the hallway linen closet, and returned with a small square of fabric. It was a baby blanket. Yellow cotton, threadbare at the corners, faded from two decades of dark storage.
“This was yours,” Rita said, shoving it into my hands.
It felt impossibly thin. It smelled of cedar wood and forgotten history. Rita sat back down and finally locked her icy blue eyes onto mine.
“You have to help,” she demanded. “You are her sister. If we keep it in the family, Vanessa can go back to school. We never have to speak of this mistake again.”
A mistake. “What about Vanessa?” I asked, my voice cracking in the sterile kitchen air. “Does she want to keep it?”
Rita waved her hand, swatting the question away like a gnat. “Vanessa is a child. She has no idea what she wants.”
I looked up at the ceiling, picturing my sister curled into a ball of panic. When Vanessa finally crept downstairs, wrapped in a gray hoodie three sizes too large, her mascara was smeared in dark rivers down her cheeks. She looked exactly like what she was: a terrified teenager trapped in a nightmare.
“Vanessa,” I said softly, ignoring my mother’s glare. “What do you want?”
She looked at Rita, then at me, her chest heaving. “I want it to go away,” she sobbed.
Rita pointed a manicured finger at my chest. “There. You heard her. She has school. She has her whole life ahead of her.”
She has school. I committed those three words to memory. I drove back to my apartment that night with the yellow blanket resting on my passenger seat. My mother had given me forty-eight hours. If I didn’t take the child, she would surrender it to the state. The silence in my car was deafening. I looked at the frayed yellow fabric illuminated by passing streetlights, entirely unaware that this fragile piece of cotton was about to become the epicenter of a war that would last nearly two decades.
