They Said I Was Adopted, but I Was Always the Real Daughter novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: What the Door Heard

My father held out the microphone, and Paulina took it with both hands.

She looked small in the aisle, in a plain blue dress, with her long hair pinned back.

She didn't look at my mother.

She looked at the hall, all two hundred faces, and I saw her throat move.

"I'm Paulina," she said. "Most of you gave me presents at my christening, so you know me."

A few people laughed uncertainly.

"I'm going to tell you what you don't know, and then I'm going to ask you to listen to something."

"Paulina," my mother said. "Sit down."

"No, Mom."

I had heard her say it before, but never to a room.

This time the room heard it too.

"When I was seven I stood in a hallway," my sister said. "On the other side of a laundry room door, my sister was being told she was nobody. So that I could stay somebody."

The hall went still.

"I let it happen. I was seven, and then I was twelve, and then I was twenty."

"Every Christmas I gave Inés the best gift at the table, and I took the second best for myself, and I thought it made us even."

Her voice cracked.

"It didn't."

I felt my own eyes sting under the mask.

"When Inés moved out at twenty, Mom threw her a party, and I cried in the bathroom for an hour. I told everyone it was allergies."

"She was never adopted," Paulina said. "I am."

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