“I don’t want them to save me,” I said. “I want to become a home for them.”
Andrea told me to prove it, so I did. I cleaned the house, completed every class, bought diapers, and prepared the nursery. I kept the walls yellow. I could not erase Sarah and Ivy. I could only make room for Emily and Grace beside them.
Months later, the twins came home as my foster daughters. The adoption followed once the court completed the case. I became their father one mistake at a time.
PART 2
The years passed through bottles, fevers, school plays, missing teeth, parent meetings, and two different birthday cakes because Emily preferred vanilla while Grace demanded chocolate. After the adoption case closed, Andrea returned the beach towels to me, and I stored them inside a cedar box.
I also kept Sarah’s photograph in my wallet, but I rarely spoke about Sarah or Ivy. I believed silence would protect my daughters from feeling like replacements for the family I had lost.
When the girls turned fifteen, they began disappearing for long afternoons and occasional weekends. They claimed they were studying, attending school activities, or helping friends. Their adoption had never been hidden from them, so I suspected they were searching for their biological relatives.
I had always promised that I would never force them to choose between me and the family they came from. Fear kept me from asking questions. For three years, I practiced losing them.
On their eighteenth birthday, I cooked their favorite dinner. Afterward, they went upstairs and returned carrying the two beach towels.
“What are those doing out of the box?” I asked.
Emily placed the white one on the table. Grace set down the pink one.
“For three years, we’ve been lying about where we were going,” Grace admitted.
My chest tightened.
“Did you find your biological family?”
Emily’s expression collapsed.
“No, Dad. This isn’t about leaving you.”
Grace pushed the white towel toward me.
“Open it.”
When I unfolded it, three plane tickets slipped onto the table. Three passengers. Three seats.
“We leave in three days,” Grace explained.
They had spent years babysitting, tutoring, walking dogs, and working weekend jobs to purchase the tickets.
“For what?” I asked.
“For you,” Emily answered.
The destination was the same beach where I had found them.
“I can’t return there.”
“Yes, you can,” Grace said. “And you won’t do it alone.”
The pink towel contained a scrapbook. Across the cover, they had written:
**Our Family Began Before We Could Remember.**
Inside were photographs of our life together. The first showed me asleep with both babies against my chest. The following pages held birthdays, school performances, report cards, missing teeth, and handmade Father’s Day cards.
Near the back was a copy of Sarah’s photograph.
“Where did you get this?”
Emily admitted she had photographed it after my wallet fell open years earlier.
“Is she why you become quiet near our birthday?” Grace asked.
I told them I had hidden Sarah because I did not want them to feel like second choices.
“We never felt that way,” Emily said.
