Angela and Robert Watson aren't sure they believe in happily ever after. At least not when it comes to adoption reunions.
Adopting children, for them, has been the source of breathtaking joy and pain.And whether the devotion they've shown the daughter they adopted will preserve their family relationship is a chapter of the story not yet written.
"As teens, both my daughters were hung up on finding their birth mothers, but my youngest was more so," Angela Watson said. "In high school, she took her birth certificate to a friend's father, an attorney. He couldn't help her."
Long pauses punctuated retelling of what is clearly a painful story. Sometimes she cried. But she doesn't want people to enter lightly into a supposedly happy reunion.
Eventually someone leaked information that was supposed to be "closed" to the Watsons' daughter, who was in her 30s.
Her biological mother was thrilled; Angela was happy for her but much more cautious.
The young woman flew to California to visit her birth mother for a few days. She stayed much longer. Less than four months later, she moved, with her children, to be with her biological mother. Angela and Robert Watson aren't quite sure where they fit in any more.
Their older daughter no longer looks for her biological parents. She's not sure of what she'd find, and she doesn't want to rock the foundations of the life she has now.
"I am so angry," Angela Watson said. "I felt like there was a contract. Papers were signed, an agreement. But that mother came to reclaim something she gave up willingly, and I'm not sure there's room for us anymore.
"I respected the sacrifice (the birth mother) made. I was very serious about the responsibility of raising her, and we did our best."
She's not upset with reunions. For her, it's about boundaries.
Her younger daughter found a strong ally in her biological father, but he didn't try to replace parents she already had. Watson believes the biological mother has tried to do just that.
After giving up her privacy in the adoption process, "auditioning with strangers" who looked at her finances and her home and her morals to decide if she would be a fit parent, raising her daughter through times good and bad, providing physical, financial and emotional support, she can't help but feel she deserved a little better.
But she's not giving up on the idea that her daughter and grandchildren will one day return to the place she's left open in her heart.
"Life's about making peace with things. And as much as I feel bad about this, I'm hanging on. I believe - I hope - that we'll be family again."