The word “Daughter?” echoed in my mind. My father was an only child. He didn’t have a sister.
But as I kept reading through the papers in the folder, an overwhelming, new truth began to form inside me. It felt like a slow and massive storm building up in my chest. I wasn’t reading about some distant cousin or a long-lost family member.
The woman I knew as Grandma Zahra hadn’t been my biological grandmother.
She had been my mother.
The postcards, the riddles, the mystery she had left behind—it wasn’t a strange, quirky game. It was her way of giving me the entire truth of my own origin story, handing it over piece by piece, only when she believed I was old enough to handle it.Continue reading…
