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“Four months later, Marcus was gone. I wanted home.”
“Then what?”
“I wrote you.”
“No answer.”
“I wrote again on their first birthday. Then Christmas. Then again.”
I shook my head.
“No. I never got anything.”
She closed her eyes.
“I thought you hated me.”
“I did,” I said. “But I would’ve answered.”
She whispered, “I know now.”
Claire handed me several photocopies.
The addresses were familiar before I consciously recognized them.
My stomach tightened.
“Carol’s house?”
Vanessa nodded.
“It was the address we used after Mom and Dad left. School forms, medical paperwork, everything. When you took the girls, I thought you still got mail there.”
Aunt Carol had helped me survive those first months. She knew every court date, every social worker, every change of address.
I looked at June.
“Why didn’t the post office forward them?”
June took the papers back.
“Because some weren’t returned by the post office.”
My skin prickled.
“What?”
June held up one envelope.
Across the front, somebody had written RETURN TO SENDER in thick black ink.
“We thought it looked strange,” she said. “Then Vanessa showed us another. And another.”
Ava looked at me carefully.
“Dad, you know that handwriting, don’t you?”
I stared at the thick black letters.
I had seen that handwriting on permission slips, birthday cards, grocery lists.
“Carol.”
Vanessa covered her face.
The reception behind us seemed suddenly unreal, all music and cake and people pretending not to listen.
I looked at my daughters.
“Where are the originals?”
Claire said, “We don’t know.”
I was already reaching for my jacket.
“Then we’re finding out tonight.”
We left through a side door: me, the girls, and Vanessa. Their husbands stayed behind with the guests.
Forty minutes later, we stood outside Carol’s old house, where her son Tommy now lived.
He opened the door wearing slippers and confusion.
“Rick? Why are you here?”
“Do you still have your mother’s papers?”
Tommy blinked.
“Some boxes upstairs. Why?”
Ava answered before I could.
“We think Aunt Carol hid letters from our mother.”
Tommy stared at Vanessa, then at me.
“That’s insane.”
“Probably,” I said. “Show me the boxes anyway.”
He stepped aside.
The attic smelled like dust and old cardboard.
We searched for almost an hour.
Then Ava called, “Dad.”
She was kneeling beside a plastic storage bin.
At the bottom sat a rubber-banded stack of envelopes.
Every one was addressed to me.
I sat on the floor.
There were birthday cards marked ONE, TWO, and THREE. A Christmas card. Letters in Vanessa’s handwriting.
All unopened.
I picked one up with shaking hands.
The seal was intact.
“She kept them.”
Nobody answered.
June opened one carefully.
Her face changed as she read.
“She asked if I still had the little birthmark beside my ear.”
Claire opened another.
“She asked whether I still curled my toes when I slept.”
Those were details from their first hours alive.
Details she knew.
Tommy sat against a trunk, pale.
“I remember Mom talking about Vanessa.”
I looked at him.
“What did she say?”
He hesitated.