Life With Anna

Anna was five when her mother sold her to me. Struggling with money, Denise Bradshaw had just lost her husband to the women next door, and heavily pregnant with his latest child, she was suffering. I met her in the supermarket on a rainy afternoon as she was buying nappies for her daughter. Anna was a skinny blonde child, malnurished and dirty. At five years old she should have been at school, but, as unbelievable as it sounds, Denise had never registered her birth, and technically Anna wasn’t even born.
Denise was, quite simply, a bad mother. You may think stuff like that doesn’t happen in America today, but I can assure you as a man in my line of work, it does. I dated her for a while, saw how she treated Anna, and dropped some hints about a friend I knew who worked in adoption. She was only to quick to think it through, and the next time I saw her, she bought it up.
‘I’m finding her incredibly hard to deal with.’ she said, Anna colouring at the table. I nodded, although I didn’t believe a word of it as she went on about Anna’s temper tantrums and refusal to eat anything. It was more the fact she didn’t feed Anna anything. And what I’d seen of Anna, she was well behaved and shy, big eyes and a sweet- but rare- smile.
‘I could… no. No, sorry.’ I said, smiling to myself.
‘What Jase? Could you…?’ she asked, leaning in.
‘If you can’t manage her money wise, I know this man who can get her adopted on the black market.’ She nodded, a cigarette sticking out her mouth.
‘It’s not that I don’t love her.’ she started, and I nodded sympathetically. ‘It’s the new baby. At least that man will give me money for it, and I can claim benifits. But Anna doesn’t exist.’ Anna looked up and her mother scowled. I smiled at the girl and she looked at me unsurely, before going back to her picture, tongue sticking out in concentration. I felt an erection just thinking about her tight little pussy, but I fought off the thought. I had to get Denise to agree to this first.
‘I know Denise. I could…. I could take her today.’ She looked down, wringing her fingers. I had know this women for two months, and it only took her that long to show me that Anna was something in her life she didn’t want. Most women, even if they didn’t want it in the first place, end up loving their babies, and by the time they were Anna’s age couldn’t imagine life without them. Denise was the other way around. Denise looked up, her eyes cold.
‘Do it. Take her now. Send me a letter telling me she’s alright. And don’t come back.’ And I peeled four fifties out of my wallet, gave them to Denise with equally cold eyes, waited for her to pack some stuff, and with a quiet word to Anna, she shut the door on me, and on her daughter.

At five, I don’t know how much Anna understood about her new life. I took her out of Manhattan completely, driving through America until I got to Texas.