Chapter-1 Quote by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

“By adopting, I was not a full-fledged mother in their eyes. I hadn't paid the price of pregnancy, hadn't earned the badge of labor…

— Jana Wolff

“I began for the first time to really understand the loss my adoptive mother must have felt from not having her own child. I…

— Zara Phillips

“The fault lies with us, and only us. It’s not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it’s definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately…

— Louise Penny

“the woman who willingly shepherded her children into the wooded dark to meet strange men but then blamed it all on a procuress?”

— Gaiutra Bahadur

“What do you mean?” I ask. “The Children’s Aid—” Mrs. Byrne clasps her hands together and gives me a tight-lipped smile. “You are no…

— Christina Baker Kline

“As for Mr. Meredith," said Miss Cornelia, "even his engagement has made a different man of him. He isn't half so dreamy and absent-minded,…

— L.M. Montgomery

“I knew that she was trying to save her little girl, but sometimes mothers with the best intentions kill their daughters all the same.”

— Laura Whitcomb

“We mothers have to be part sleuth, I realized.”

— Linda Greenlaw

“Her mother was by turns tender and pathetic and terrifying, broken in a way that no one, in that time or place, had any…

— Karen Abbott

“That was the problem with grieving one child in a family with other children. In my despair over losing Riley, I’d lost my daughter…

— Leslie A. Gordon

“All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence.”

— Mitch Albom

“No one wanted to talk to a mother whose only child had just killed herself.”

— Kimberly McCreight