It was never a secret. Dylan grew up knowing that he was adopted and it never concerned him because he had all he needed in his mom and dad. Even after moving to college, he didn’t give finding his birth mother a second thought because there was no reason to disrupt his happy family life.
However, after suffering for months from one infection and illness after another which ultimately led to a diagnosis of aplastic anemia, he learns that his best chance of surviving is to find his biological mother. Dylan and his parents hire a detective to begin the search and nothing could have prepared him for the roller coaster of emotions that followed.
When the detective returns with three potential women as his birth mother, Dylan realizes for the first time that there are so many possible outcomes to finding her. Was he hurting his parents by finding her? Would she even want to know about him, much less meet him? What about his biological father? Did he have half-siblings? Would any of them be willing to submit DNA to see if they were a potential match for the desperately needed bone marrow transplant that could save his life?
But once you open Pandora’s Box, there’s no going back. With each passing month of searching, Dylan becomes more and more ill and the race to find a donor is becoming more and more essential. But as the investigations continue more questions than answers are found. Can Dylan find what he needs before it’s too late, or is the only thing uncovered in this search family secret
Family secrets hurt, but family lies can be fatal. Carter Mills would know; he just learned his entire life up to this point has been a lie. He thought his life couldn’t get any worse when he lost his mother in a tragic house fire as a teenager. He believed going off to college would be his chance to hit the reset button and move past the destruction of his family. But then he gets a call that his father has passed away too and he finds himself an orphan. He returns home to make burial arrangements and clean out his father’s apartment. While there he comes across documents that will change his life forever…adoption papers.
Carter has to come to terms with being lied to his entire life by the two people he believed to be his parents upon learning he had been adopted. He is not only struggling with feelings of loneliness and heartache after losing both his parents but is now trying to make sense of the new feelings of betrayal and of having no identity. All these emotions spark a new desire to locate his biological parents and he consults a detective to find them.
Amber Newsom allowed herself one night to let her guard down and fell for the popular high school jock that paid her a little attention and asked her to Prom. Little did she know that one night would change her life forever when she discovered she was pregnant. Her parents forced her to live a lie from that point on as they shipped her off to family in another state to hide her pregnancy during her Senior year of high school. She had a baby boy all alone and then was forced to give him up for adoption. Things didn’t improve upon returning home as she had to continue to live the lie her parents spun and had to ignore the fact that she had just had a baby and given it up for adoption. Amber eventually moved away and was able to start a new life for herself, but she never forgot her son. Carter and Amber are among the lucky few who get the dream reunion everyone hopes for when meeting their long-lost family member. But the blissful encounter doesn’t last as the ghosts of the past have more secrets and lies to reveal when Carter learns about his biological father, Jordan Beaumont. Can all secrets be forgiven? Can all wrongs be righted? Can you ever get past the hurt and pain of family lies?
They didn’t know his name, but he was never a stranger to Dave’s family. None of them had ever met him and only knew he was mom’s first child. They celebrated his birthday every year, so, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that shortly after his eighteenth birthday, a private investigator arrived on our doorstep asking questions about one of the hardest decisions my wife, Kelsey, ever had to make. The son she gave up for adoption when she was in college was looking for her. I just wished she was still alive to enjoy her greatest wish come true.
Noah lived a life most would describe as difficult, as he was transferred from one foster home to another until he aged out of the system on his eighteenth birthday. After overhearing a private phone conversation of one of his customers and learning about his job as a detective specializing in locating birth parents of adopted children, he decided to search for his own. But as they say, ignorance is bliss, and sometimes not knowing is better. As Noah learns things about his birth parents that he never wanted to know, he quickly begins to regret his decision to find them and has to decide how he wants to handle the information about who his parents were.
Life doesn’t always turn out exactly like we hope. Learning the sins of others is a difficult burden to carry. We all make decisions that, in that moment, seem to be the best option, but leave us always wondering if they were. But how do you change the trajectory of those past mistakes to make them right? How do you make amends for your errors? Are today’s healing actions enough to forget a painful history? How do you move forward so that you can live without family regrets?
J.C. Poole 