Her father’s gaze softened. “Linda, to us, you were always our child. We wanted to put your past behind us. We didn’t mean for it to feel like betrayal.” His words struggled under the weight of her silence. The room felt foreign, as if she had stepped into someone else’s family history and found herself written inside. She knew this revelation would take time to process.
Later, she returned to confront the doctor who had gone pale at her question. His shoulders slumped as she told him what her parents had revealed. “There was nothing in your chart,” he admitted. “When I saw the scar, I feared I—the hospital—would be suspected of malpractice—something done during the C-section, undocumented.”