The Unscripted Question
We waited until Willa’s friend had gone home.
Then we told her everything.
I described Grant’s face and explained who he was.
She went quiet.
“The actor? The one whose movie you both hated?”
“Reid hated it,” I said. “I merely slept through it.”
“Great. My origin story has bad reviews.”
Then she asked what he’d wanted.
We told her.
The documentary.
The invented answers.
The three million dollars.
She stopped smiling.
“He offered you money to send me away?”
“We refused,” Reid said immediately.
“I know you did.”
She took a breath.
“Did you even think about it?”
“Not for a second,” I said.
“Good. Because I wasn’t going.”
Then came the harder question.
“Did he know I existed? Before you adopted me?”
I told her what our adoption paperwork established.
The agency had contacted her biological father, but he’d declined to get involved.
His parental rights had eventually been terminated.
The records we’d received hadn’t identified him by name.
Until Grant appeared at our door, we hadn’t known who he was.
And the paperwork couldn’t tell us why he’d stayed away.
Willa sat very still.
“So he knew.”
“Yes.”
“Did he ever send me a birthday card?”
I shook my head, then remembered she couldn’t see it.
“No.”
“A letter? Anything?”
“Nothing we received.”
She nodded once, like she was taking inventory.
I hated that I couldn’t give her a better answer.
“And he didn’t come.”
“No.”
She pressed her palms against the table.
“Was it because I’m blind?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
It was the hardest answer I could give her.
I wouldn’t invent a kinder one.
Reid moved closer, then stopped.
“Can I sit beside you?”
She nodded.
For a while, nobody spoke.
Then Willa said, “I want to ask him myself.”
“You can,” Reid said.
“And I want to hear what these documentary people think happened to me.”
I told her I’d insisted on their contact details.
“You were planning something,” she said.
“I was buying time. Not agreeing for you.”
“Good. Send me that script. Accessible copy, please. No dramatic reading by Dad Number One.”
“I’m Dad Number One?”
“You’re Dad Spreadsheet. Reid’s Dad Frosting.”
Reid looked offended.
Then pleased.
The next afternoon, Grant’s assistant sent the materials.
We verified the producer through the company website and contacted her office.
Willa wanted a private meeting, not a filmed interview.
Claire, the producer, agreed.
I sent a statement identifying us as Willa’s legal parents and correcting the claim that Grant had raised her.
She replied that the production was still verifying the background and wanted to hear directly from Willa.
No cameras.
No release forms.
Willa insisted on her own questions.
She listened to the script on her screen reader, snorting at the imaginary kitchen memories.
But when she reached the unanswered question, she removed her headphones.
“They couldn’t even make up what I’d say about being abandoned.”
I sat beside her.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I know.”
“You can still want to know him.”
“I know that too.”
“If I ask him why he left, I’m not promising to forgive him,” she added.
“Nobody is asking you to.”
“And if I want to know him later, that doesn’t mean I love you less.”
My throat tightened.
“We know.”
She reached for the stuffed rabbit she’d had since she was four.
Rubbed its worn ear between her fingers, just as she’d done the day we met.
May you like
Then returned it to the shelf.
“I just don’t want strangers deciding what happened to me.”
