Family’s Regret After Choosing Adoptive Sister Over Me Chapter 1

I was separated from my parents when I was young and grew up in foster care. I don't pick up on hints. I say what I mean.

At boarding school, an older girl shoved contraband tobacco into my drawer. "Keep it in here for now. They won't expel an underclassman."

I turned around, walked to the headmaster's office, and reported her.

Later, when I was working at a fast-food place, my shift lead handed me spoiled cheese. "Slip it into a burger before anyone notices. It won't kill them."

I shoved the cheese straight into his mouth. "If it won't kill anyone, why aren't you eating it?"

Then, when I was twenty, my birth parents brought me back to the Warren estate and later threw me a belated homecoming dinner.

At the dinner, Diana, their adopted daughter, ignored my place card and took the seat at the center of the long table.

She held her glass of champagne and looked at me innocently. "Sylvia, I'm so used to sitting between Mom and Dad. You don't mind, do you?"

Everyone waited for me to smile politely and sit somewhere else.

I asked her seriously, "Why would you think I'd mind? Because that's my seat?"

She bit her lip, and her eyes started to turn red.

I kept going. "So it is my seat.

"Then shouldn't you be getting up?"

* * *

The room went silent. The clink of a silver fork against a china plate carried across it. Relatives and friends lined both sides of the long table, their gazes sliding from Diana's face to the card in front of her.

It read Sylvia Warren.

Diana's fingers tightened around the stem of her glass. She looked down at the card, and her eyes turned red almost at once, as if I had humiliated her in front of everyone.

My mother, Evelyn, reached over first, put a hand on my wrist, and pressed down. Her ring dug into my wrist. She kept her voice low, but loud enough for the whole table to hear. "Sylvia, tonight is about you coming home. Don't make it awkward."

My father set down his glass and joined in. "It's a chair. One is as good as another."

I picked up my place card and set it beside the bronze family crest in the middle of the table.

"If one is the same as another, why is my name on the invitations? Why are there flower arrangements all over the estate tonight that say 'Welcome Home, Sylvia'? Why is my card sitting in front of this chair?"

My aunt, seated to my right, put down her fork and looked at my father.

"Alexander, Sylvia is right. At a formal homecoming dinner, you don't rearrange the seats of honor. Outsiders will take it to mean the Warren family hasn't decided whether to acknowledge her."

My mother's expression shifted.

Her gaze swept over the guests. A few of the distant relatives already had their heads together.

In the corner, the videographer held his camera, still aimed at the head table, unsure whether to keep rolling.

Diana stood up slowly, her chair legs dragging over the carpet with a dull scrape. "I'll move. She's the real daughter. I shouldn't have been sitting here in the first place."

She pressed a hand to her chest, and her voice shook. My mother immediately put one hand on her shoulder and held the other out toward me, as if afraid I might take another step. "Sweetheart, don't say that. Nobody is sending you anywhere."

Lucas, the youngest of my three brothers, got to his feet. He frowned at me, his fist clenched around his cuff. "Sylvia. Happy now?"

My hands closed into fists. I was too angry to get a word out.

She took my seat. She was the one in the wrong. And yet every question in the room was aimed at me.

Diana's breathing grew fast and shallow, and her fingers tightened around my mother's sleeve. She whispered, "Mom," before slumping sideways.

My mother went white and immediately helped her toward the sitting room. Lucas followed. Ethan, my oldest brother, followed. Noah, my middle brother, was a doctor. As he got up, he knocked a napkin off his chair. He didn't stop for it. He grabbed his coat and went after them.

My father stood up too.

My aunt lifted her cane and held it across his path. "If you walk out of here tonight, what the guests will remember isn't that Diana felt unwell. It's that you left your own daughter alone at her homecoming dinner."

My father's hand stayed on the back of the chair, his knuckles turning white. A second later, he stepped around her anyway and followed them into the sitting room.

I stood there and realized that maybe I wasn't their daughter at all.

Whenever Diana didn't feel well, the whole family went to take care of her. She had a nightmare, so Ethan walked out of a meeting halfway through and came home to sit with her until she fell asleep. Her chest felt tight, so my parents left me alone at Disney World and took her to a doctor. And if I held on to their sleeves and asked them not to go, I was the one being difficult...

Why did Diana always come before everything else in this house?

I was about to put my card back when I noticed a sheet of last-minute changes tucked under the seating chart.

Sylvia Warren had been crossed out in red pen and replaced with Sylvia Hart. Underneath, someone had added a note: Overflow seating, near the kitchen entrance.

That was the moment I understood that this family had never actually taken me in.

Chapter 10

Six months later, I bought my own place.

On my birthday, the doorbell rang. My parents, my three brothers, and Diana were standing outside. My father was holding flowers, and instead of walking right in like he used to, he asked, "May we come in?"

I stepped aside.

The table was small, and there weren't enough chairs. Lucas went to get more without being asked. Ethan hung up everyone's coats. Noah asked if he could put the cake in the fridge.

My mother stood beside the table without telling anyone where to sit. "Sylvia, where do you want to sit?"

That stopped me for a second.

It was an ordinary question, and yet it took me somewhere else for a moment. This was the first birthday I'd spent with all of them since they found me.

No concert. Nobody stationed outside somebody else's bedroom door. Nobody leaving in a hurry the second the candles were lit. I even caught myself glancing at the phone on the table. Nobody took a call, and nobody stood up.

It turns out that when everybody is actually at the table, a birthday can be this quiet.

I pulled out the chair by the window. "Here."

My mother nodded. "All right."

No one asked where Diana usually sat.

When the cake was cut, my mother started to pass the first slice to Diana out of habit, then stopped halfway. Diana noticed. She didn't wait for it to be placed in front of her the way she used to. She said quietly, "Sylvia first. It's her birthday."

My mother looked at me and held out the plate. "The first slice is yours."

I took it, and the three birthdays before this one came back to me. The concert tickets. The empty chairs. The dinner gone cold. The frosting that had melted by one in the morning.

I used to think the next birthday would be better. The next one had finally arrived.

They were all sitting here. No one told me to wait. No one pushed what mattered to me to the back of the line. They had finally remembered to ask where I wanted to sit. And yet I wasn't as happy as I'd imagined I would be.

I suppose that is what it looks like when someone makes it up to you too late.

You don't get it when you want it most. When they bring it to you later, no matter how carefully, all it proves is that they've finally understood why it hurt you back then.

I looked down and took a bite of the cake.

Still sweet. Just not the slice I was waiting for three years ago.

When I walked them out that night, Diana was the last to go.

"Do you still hold people accountable?"

"Yes."

"Isn't that exhausting?"

I looked at the name on my door.

Sylvia Hart.

"It used to be. Not anymore."

"Why?" Diana asked.

I put my hand on the door handle. "Because before, I had to keep asking questions to prove I'd been wronged. I don't have to anymore.

"I choose my own place."