Letting Emma go
Judy asked for a oneshot of there never having been a curse and Mary Margaret and David Nolan tracking down the baby Mary Margaret's stepmother made them give up when they were 16. When they find Emma, they see she has a family and is happy. They have to work out a way to tell her who they are.
Ten long years. Ten painful years of searching and it all ended here. It seemed their daughter had stayed in Maine. After paying a Private Investigator, he tracked their baby girl down to an address in Somerset County. Some of their fears had been quenched finding her, but others ignited. Mary Margaret and David were relieved to find out their daughter hadn't become a forgotten baby. That she had escaped a system that can often be so cruel to the children entrusted into its care and seemed to have left it behind for good. Emma had kept the name she'd been given by the birth parents. That, along with the blanket embroidered with said name, had been the only things the teens were able to give their little girl before Mary Margaret's stepmother had forced them to give her up. Now here Emma was, with a brand new family of her own. Parents who loved her, siblings who played with her. A home with steady money…Mary Margaret and David were of course happy Emma had everything, but that didn't stop their pain. Did she even know she was adopted? She had been so young when the Swans had taken her in. Now here they were, watching their daughter play from behind newspapers on a park bench. Their hearts were racing. She was just so…perfect.
"What do we do now?" Mary Margaret whispered, heartbroken. Yes, they had found Emma, but what could they do now? They had been forced to sign away any legal rights to her they had, and there was no way of getting them back. Besides, she looked so happy. Could they take that away from her?
"We let her go." David answered, choking up. In his hands, David clutched a letter he and Mary Margaret had written to their daughter before they left on this crazy mission. "Emma is happy with the Swans. We would be wrong to take that from her. Wrong to force her to know the truth. She might know she's adopted, she might not. We don't have the right to tell her." David pulled the heartbroken Mary Margaret into his shaky arms and kissed the top of her head. "There's no point in staying here." He whispered. "We're just hurting ourselves. We know that she's loved. We know that she's happy. That's all we can ask. We need to let her go." Together, the couple got up and walked away, neither noticing that their letter to their long lost daughter lay abandoned on the bench.
I won't be writing a sequel to this :).
