Family’s Regret After Choosing Adoptive Sister Over Me

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.