I thought adopting my late best friend’s four children was the hardest thing I’d ever do — until a stranger showed up at my door years later. She said my friend “wasn’t who she said she was,” then handed me a letter. My late friend’s lies had come back to threaten the life we’d built without her.
Rachel was my best friend for as long as I could remember.
There was no single moment when we became friends.
We just always were.
We sat next to each other in elementary school because our last names were close in the alphabet.
In high school, we shared clothes. In college, we shared bad apartments and stories about worse boyfriends.
By the time we had children, we shared calendars and carpools.
“This is it,” Rachel said once, standing in my kitchen with a baby on her hip and another tugging at her leg.
“This is the part they don’t tell you about.”
“The love.” She beamed at me. “How it just keeps multiplying.”
I had two kids.
She had four.
She was tired all the time, but she glowed in a way that felt real. Rachel loved being a mom more than anything.
Or at least, that’s what I believed.
You think you know someone after 20 years.
You think friendship means transparency, but looking back now, I wonder how many secrets Rachel carried that I never saw.
How many times did she almost tell me the truth?
I’ll never know.
Everything changed shortly after Rachel gave birth to her fourth child, a little girl she named Rebecca. It had been a difficult pregnancy.
Rachel was on bed rest for the last half of it.
Barely a month after they brought Becca home, Rachel’s husband was in a car accident.
I was folding laundry when my phone rang.
“I need you,” Rachel said.
“I need you to come now.”
When I got to the hospital, she was sitting in a plastic chair, holding the baby carrier between her knees.
She looked up at me with tears in her eyes.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just held her while she cried.
***
The funeral was on a Saturday.
Rain pounded the cemetery while Rachel stood there with her children clustered around her.
“I don’t know how to do this alone,” she whispered to me afterward.
Not long after that, she was diagnosed with cancer.
“I don’t have time for this,” she said when she told me. “I just got through one nightmare.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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