My wife and I adopted a newborn baby girl. When she was seven years old, my wife got pregnant. I WAS STUNNED when I heard WHAT my wife said, leaving the hospital

Just before New Year’s, happy Mary strolled along the snowy sidewalks with a stroller and proudly looked at passersby. Before, seeing moms walking with children, Mary would lower her head, feeling defective because of her inability to give birth. Now everything had changed.

She walked with her head held high. And it didn’t matter that she hadn’t given birth to little Emily. She was a mom, period.

Emily was a charming baby. Mary liked to look at her. Such tiny hands and feet, and the fingers… The girl’s hair was very light, almost white.

«Our daughter will look like me. No one will have any doubts. I was a little blonde in childhood too,» Mary shared her joy with her husband. The parents doted on their adopted daughter. Little Emily learned to hold her head up.

Little Emily learned to roll over onto her tummy. Emily got her first tooth. Such seemingly simple things were whole events for Mary and John.

By the time Emily was a year old and learning to take her first steps, something unexpected happened. Mary noticed that the girl’s gray-blue eyes were darkening. «John, look, she’s getting dark specks,» Mary worried.

«I don’t see anything. I think you’re imagining it,» John smirked and took Emily in his arms, making her smile broadly. «I’m telling you, they’re there. I looked at her eyes all day today. Oh, John, I’m afraid our Emily will turn out brown-eyed. One of my friends’ son had his eyes darken. They were blue at first too.»

«So what?» John smiled. «Will we love a brown-eyed daughter less?» «I don’t know, I don’t know,» Mary whispered and shook her head.

Emily’s eyes darkened rapidly, but her hair stayed light. By one and a half years, the girl became brown-eyed with light blond hair. Now Mary tried to appear less with her daughter in public.

What would they think? What would they start saying? The neighbors who had lived in the house for a long time knew John’s parents well. They were both fair-haired and blue-eyed.

By three years old, Emily turned into a brunette. «It’s like your little girl has been switched,» a neighbor met Mary on the street. «She was fair-haired, and now she’s suddenly darkened.»

«My father was like that. Emily takes after her grandpa,» Mary lied, feeling her face flush. And so the gossip started, she fumed.

Some time later, one neighbor, Mary’s age, told her that the old ladies in the yard were gossiping that Emily looked like some Jake from the next street. Mary didn’t know who that was, but it was clear they thought Emily was conceived on the side. Exactly what Mary feared.

«Watch out,» the neighbor said, «if your John hears, how will he react? And the girl really does look like Jake.» «Mind your own business,» Mary hissed. «Deal with your own families. See who your kids look like. And Emily is from John. Got it? And tell all the gossips that. My daughter is from my husband. She looks like my father, her grandpa. Genes, ever heard of them? And I’ve never seen any Jake,» Mary yelled.

«Okay, okay, I’ll tell them,» the neighbor was taken aback. Something made Mary really nervous. «Looks like she’s guilty. No wonder people gossip about Jake,» the neighbor decided.

After that conversation, Mary’s attitude toward her adopted daughter began to change for the worse. She started distancing herself from Emily. There was no more of the former tenderness.

The daughter seemed to Mary a source of problems. Emily turned seven. She started first grade.

The girl looked nothing like her parents. No one doubted that Emily wasn’t their biological daughter. Especially not John’s.

There were kind people who first hinted to John about it, then said it outright. They talked about Jake. It was unpleasant for John to hear…