In The Adoption by Cynthia Garriock, some stories begin with a choice. Others with silence.
When Dr. Mara Sharpe delivers a teenage girl’s baby in a Vancouver alleyway, the trauma of her own teen pregnancy comes rushing back: the unspoken shame, her family’s abandonment, and the baby boy she was forced to give away.
For years, that hidden pain has fueled Mara’s workaholism, fracturing her marriage and alienating her adult daughter. Desperate to heal, Mara submits a commercial DNA test to trace her son—then learns of her mother’s rapidly worsening Alzheimer’s.
Returning to her estranged family in Ontario, Mara is determined to demand answers before her mother’s fading memory takes any secrets to the grave. But as a lifetime of lies begins to surface, Mara realizes the people who cast her out buried more than she ever imagined.
