He had done it because, long before our family existed, one exhausted nurse had loved our daughter when almost nobody else knew her name.
The tattoo I once thought represented a secret became something completely different.
A reminder.
A promise.
A piece of a story that began before mine did.
And when I look at it now, I no longer see the woman I feared for twenty years.
I see the woman who held my daughter when she was too small to come home.
The woman who loved her enough to let her go.
And the woman whose tiny embroidered rose had been quietly sitting on Claire’s blanket all along.
I just hadn’t known what it meant
