I walked out that day, too overwhelmed to process any of it. But the truth stayed with me. It didn’t let me go. I kept seeing that girl’s face in my mind—her face, my face—and wondering what she had been told. What she thought of me. Whether she hated me for disappearing.

Weeks passed before I gathered the courage to return. I knocked on the same door, heart in my throat, and told the girl—my daughter—the truth. I told her how scared I had been, how young and lost I felt, and how I had made the only choice I thought I could at the time. She listened. Then, with tears in her eyes, she hugged me.

My mother, standing quietly in the background, finally spoke. “She wants to know you,” she said softly. I don’t expect to fix the past. I can’t rewrite the choices or erase the hurt. But I’m here now. And little by little, we’re learning to move forward—as mother and daughter, and as something else entirely: a family rediscovering itself.