Free Stranger With My Face by Lois Duncan

the wide, startled
     look that Neal’s get when he’s confronted with something he doesn’t know how to handle. “The whole thing is so long behind
     us, and we had no choice. We couldn’t take both of you. We couldn’t even afford one baby, really, but we wanted you so desperately—”
    “You couldn’t take us!” I repeated. “Take us where?” A second possibility occurred to me, and I heard my voice rising in an
     unnatural squeak that sounded like someone in a soap opera. “Am I adopted?”
    “Oh, Lord, I’ve really messed things up now, haven’t I?” Mom shook her head miserably. “When you came in here asking about
     a twin, I thought that, if you’d discovered that much, then you already knew the circumstances. I never wanted to tell you
     like this. Let’s go get Dad. We’ll sit down together and talk it through, and he’ll explain—”
    “I am adopted, aren’t I? Tell me!”
    “Yes.” Mom started to get to her feet, her arms reaching out for me, but I motioned her back.
    “You’ve lied to me! For seventeen years, you’ve lied!”
    “That’s not true,” Mom said. “We never lied, we simply didn’t tell you. Why does it matter? You’re our child just as much
     as your brother and sister are. We couldn’t love you more if I’d carried you in my body. There never seemed to be any reason
     to make you wonder and worry over things that should have no bearing on your life.” She paused and then added pleadingly,
     “Let’s go downstairs now, Laurie. Your father can explain it all better than I can.”
    “You mean the man I’ve always thought of as my ‘father,’” I said cruelly, wanting to hurt her, to repay her for the terrible hurt she had just inflicted upon me.
     “He’s Neal’s and Megan’s father, not mine.”
    “He’s your father in every way that counts,” Mom said.
    And so we went down, and she got Dad out of his office, and we sat at the kitchen table, which is where talks in our family
     are always held, and he told me the story. He did not seem as shaken up as Mom. It was as though he had been anticipating
     this moment for a long time.
    “I always figured someday we’d have to go through this,” he said. “Someday something would come up—a need for a medical history,
     maybe—and you couldn’t keep thinking your genes were coming straight down the line from the Strattons and the Comptons. A
     lot of people are open about adoption. Still, that idea has always upset your mother.”
    “We have such a good life together, the five of us,” Mom said defensively. “I couldn’t bear to think of spoiling it. Whether
     everyone else is doing it or not, it can’t be a good thing to split a family into segments. You hear about all these young
     people discovering that they’re adopted and going off to find their ‘real parents,’ as though their adoptive parents were
     nothing more than babysitters.”
    “I want to know,” I said flatly. “I want to know everything.”
    “Well, I’ll tell you,” Dad said, “but first I want some wine.”
    He got up and got glasses for himself and Mom, and would have given me one, but I waved it away. Then he sat back down and
     poured for the two of them and raised his glass and took a swallow.
    “It’s simple,” he said. “We wanted a child, and we couldn’t have one. We tried for years. Doctors told us your mother’s ovaries
     weren’t functioning properly. They couldn’t pinpoint the reason, they just weren’t. We tried to adopt in New York State and
     got turned down, which wasn’t surprising; an aspiring writer married to an aspiring artist, with no money coming in, aren’t
     promising parent material.
    “But we wanted a kid; we were that selfish, I guess, and had that much faith in ourselves and in each other. We were sure
     the lean years were going to give way and one or both of us would eventually make it. What we were afraid of was that by the
     time that happened we’d be beyond the age to