Iris Monroe drew in a long breath and let it out as a sigh, the kind that carried two decades of silence on its back.
"Your uncle is not wrong," she said quietly. "You and Hailey are not children I gave birth to. When I first met your father, he already had the two of you with him."
Her gaze drifted past her son and daughter, lost for a moment in a memory she had clearly carried, untouched, for a very long time.
"You were both still toddlers back then. Someone was hunting your father, that much I understood, though I never learned who. He had been badly wounded, and he collapsed at my doorstep with the two of you in his arms. I took him in. I bandaged him up. Later, the two of us grew close, and we became husband and wife. To raise the two of you properly, we agreed not to have any more
