RALEIGH - With little fanfare, a late-in-life mother who gave up her twins admitted Friday she broke the law by vanishing into Canada last Christmas with the toddlers.

Allison Quets' plea came suddenly. She kept it from a web of friends so thick and dear some had installed private phone lines devoted to her regular calls from the Franklin County jail.

"I guess she felt she ran out of options," said Marianna Leman, an old friend who was startled to field a reporter's query instead of Quets' routine Friday morning call. "She was being crippled in there." Just a day before, Quets talked as she normally did to another friend, Kimber MacGibbon, speaking of hating jail food and missing the twins.

Quets, who lived in Orlando, Fla., signed over the children to Kevin and Denise Needham of Apex in 2005, fearing she was too ill to care for them. Quets has been fighting to regain custody since and had won limited visitation rights when she disappeared with the toddlers during a scheduled visit in the Triangle in December. She took the then-17-month-old Holly and Tyler to a bed-and-breakfast 30 minutes across the Canadian border; on Christmas Day, the Needhams called Apex police to report the twins missing.

As quietly as Quets disappeared with the twins, she entered a federal courtroom in Raleigh on Friday to say she broke the law.

Quets stood beside her attorney, Kathleen Mullin, as U.S. District Judge James Dever III quizzed her about the plea agreement, making sure she understood it. Quets was sometimes hesitant to respond. She asked to consult Mullin before she admitted kidnapping the children.

Then, she slowly sat.

Until a sentencing hearing set for December, Quets is free to travel in North Carolina and Florida. A federal judge will decide whether she should return to prison or be excused for time she has already served. She could face another five years in prison.

She planned to head to Wilmington on Friday to find some respite with a friend.

Finally free of her prison-issued red jumpsuit, she walked out of the courthouse talking of reuniting with the children. She bore them at the age of 47 after paying a clinic to impregnate her.

'Every minute'

"It's the most important thing in the world for me to get to see my children," a worn Quets said into a bank of cameras. She said she thinks of them "every day, every minute."

Mullin spoke optimistically of Quets' dream of seeing Holly and Tyler again. "The adoptive parents have been open to the idea of visitation," Mullin said during the hearing.

Those matters will be squared away in Florida courtrooms, where Quets and the Needhams have been wrangling for years. A hearing is scheduled in the twins' adoption Monday in Duval County, Fla. Another hearing in a civil lawsuit Quets filed against the Needhams is set for next month. Quets' release order allows her to travel to Florida to handle these matters.

The Florida proceedings are secret; the documents generated there have been sealed. The Needhams, as well as attorneys for both sides, have been mum. They said little Friday, even as Quets vowed to rekindle her fight to mother her twins.

"Our primary concern is the well-being of our family and maintaining our children's privacy," the Needhams said in a prepared statement.

The Needhams met Quets through a relative in 2004. At the time, Quets battled a life-threatening illness she developed during the pregnancy.

She spent five months of the pregnancy confined to a hospital bed. Weak and nauseated, Quets decided she couldn't care for the twins. Within five weeks of their birth in July 2005, she signed an adoption consent order allowing the Needhams to take them. Within 12 hours, friends say, Quets regretted her decision and called the Needhams and asked them to tear up the order. They refused.

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