Then I crossed out the last sentence.
I rewrote it.
This isn’t just a home. It’s our home.
I put the note back beside the cake.
A few minutes later, Mason appeared in the doorway.
“You okay?”
I nodded.
“Yeah.”
He smiled.
Then he said the one word I had spent thirteen years never asking to hear.
“Mom?”
I turned around.
“Yeah?”
“Can we have the last piece of cake?”
I laughed through my tears.
“Both of you?”
Noah appeared behind him.
“Obviously.”
For the first time in thirteen years, I didn’t feel like the woman who had taken in two abandoned children.
I felt like their mother.
Not because a court document said so.
Not because a trust was signed over.
Not because anyone finally admitted what I had sacrificed.
But because two grown men had looked at the family they were born into…
and chosen the family that never left.
And that was worth more than fifteen million dollars could ever be.
