When my sister Megan showed up at my door in the pouring rain with her adopted daughter, Ava, I knew something was terribly wrong. She dropped a DNA test on my table and whispered, “This child isn’t ours.”
She explained that she and her husband had done a DNA test to learn about Ava’s background—but the results showed Ava was closely related to her. Then she looked at me with fear in her eyes and said the unthinkable:
“Hannah… Ava is your daughter.”
Six years earlier, at 22, scared and completely alone, I had given up a baby for adoption. I believed I was giving her a better life. But the adoptive parents failed, lost custody, and Ava ended up in the foster system—eventually being adopted by my sister without either of us knowing the truth.
