The Secret Daughter by Kelly Rimmer

short? I loved my hair, but I’d always taken the safe road with how I styled it, I’d never even coloured it, or worn a dramatic cut. I knew it was my best feature. Glossy and healthy, a beautiful shade of warm brown, my hair was straight and thick and bouncy, even if it was humid or if I’d washed it in terrible shampoo or on the very rare occasion that I had been exercising.
    Mum’s hair was dark brown too, but beneath the dye it had long since turned grey. Her hair was wiry and untamed. At some point I’d assumed that the difference between my bouncy hair and Mum’s frizzy hair was the dyes she used for so many decades, and I’d shied away.
    Would a Sabina raised with people who looked more like her have made bolder stylistic choices?
    My voice was spectacular. Teachers had told me since I was a child that I was one of the most naturally gifted vocalists they’d ever taught. But I cruised through high school and university, putting in the minimum level of effort possible to gain a pass, and then I’d maintained that attitude throughout my career. Would that other Sabina have had more ambition, more drive? I had always been so content, there was no burning need within me to become more famous or to make lots of money, but maybe if I had possessed such a drive, the world would have been my oyster. I would surely have gone to another school, and what difference would that have made? Would I have gone to the same uni? Would I have gone to uni at all?
    Would I have met Ted?
    Would I still have loved him, even if I did?
    Would we be pregnant now? Would we be pregnant with this child?
    Or . . . would I have a brood of children already? I felt I’d left it late in life to start my family, but that had come not from some drive to build a career or wait for the perfect time, more a spoilt assumption of good fortune. My life had long since taught me that things would just work out for me, one way or another; why rush to have a baby?
    Of course, the other possibility was that my childhood would have been awful, and that I’d have been damaged beyond repair if I’d not been relinquished. Would I have fallen into addiction? Would I have been depressive? Would I have made terrible choices with relationships?
    And what about my stutter? I’d mastered it, but the truth was, Mum had mastered it. It had taken years for me to get to the point that I could confidently communicate, and I distinctly remembered fighting my mother through every step of that journey. I had wanted so badly to just give up; very willing to accept that I’d never speak clearly and to find other ways to live my life. As a child, usually sulking after Mum had physically locked me in the car to force me go to speech therapy, I’d imagine easier ways to solve the problem of my stutter. I’d just sing instead – all of the time. Or I’d write people notes, or I’d just find a way to avoid communicating with people altogether. Usually I imagined myself living isolated forever.
    Would that other me, with that other mother, have ever crawled out from beneath the shadow of her stutter? Would she have even discovered that she could sing, fluently and with faultless perfection, every single time?
    The thought of living with the choking unpredictability of the jerking speech I’d struggled through as a child was unbearable.
    If that would have been my fate, I doubted that I’d have survived it intact.
    It is a strange thing to know yourself, and to realise at the same time that you are merely the product of the nest within which you are raised – and that a different nest might easily have produced a different you . As I walked that day, I grieved and worried for that other me, and I missed and regretted not knowing her. She might have been a miserable failure. Equally though, she could have been fabulous, she might have been amazing, she might have overcome all of the flaws that I felt had held me back at one time or another.
    I was about to turn into our