Shaken but determined, the girls promised one another they would keep their discovery to themselves for the time being and, once they were grown, would try to find their biological mother.
At the same time, their birth mother Vera, burdened by regret, was trying to trace the daughters she had given up years earlier. Before long, stress and hard labor took a toll on her health, and she landed in the hospital with serious complications.
Her doctors had to perform emergency surgery to save her life. Afterward, she was told she would never be able to have children again.
Once she was discharged, Vera took a hard look at her life and found herself thinking every day about the daughters she had left behind. Only much later did she learn from a legal aid office that, back then, she would have qualified for substantial public assistance as a single mother of triplets.
At the large company where she had worked as a laborer, she might even have been eligible for housing support and financial help to raise the girls.
Realizing how badly she had misunderstood her options, Vera made up her mind that she would find her daughters no matter how long it took. At the hospital archives, she managed to learn only that the girls had been adopted quickly, but staff refused to reveal the identities of the adoptive families.
In those years, the only way to get that kind of information unofficially was through corrupt channels, and Vera simply did not have the thousands of dollars it would have taken. Back in her cold rented room, she made herself a promise: she would earn the money and one day find her daughters.
She threw herself into work, taking every shift she could, and each year on their birthday she deposited more money into a savings account she kept for that purpose.
All that time, Vera worried about the girls and hoped they were safe, loved, and growing up happy. Eighteen long years passed that way, shaped by work, waiting, and the quiet ache of not knowing. ..
