She sometimes imagined an empty chair at the dinner table where Mara might have sat.
Mara looked toward the spare chair beside the window.
“I don’t know what we should call this,” she said.
“Neither do I,” Caroline replied.
“We don’t have to decide tonight.”
The conversation moved on to gardening and a proposed trip to the coast.
After dessert, I helped clear the plates.
Caroline thanked me for coming and said she had worried the evening would become another interrogation of her past.
I told her the dinner had felt like the beginning of something ordinary.
She smiled and said that was exactly what she wanted.
Driving home, I thought of the empty chair at our own kitchen table.
I had spent weeks seeing it as evidence of failure.
Now I wondered whether one day it might simply be a chair again.
CHAPTER 36: The Hearing Room
Naomi arranged a formal evidence review attended by attorneys representing the former trust and several affected families.
The session focused on authenticity, chain of custody, and the chronology of the surviving records.
I was called to explain how Aaron and I found our father’s letter.
I described the workshop boxes, the blue tape, and the open envelope without adding conclusions about Richard.
An attorney asked why I had not opened the box years earlier.
I said I had not known it contained anything related to Alder House.
The attorney asked whether my anger over the affair might influence my memory.
I acknowledged that I was angry and explained that the photographs and recorded dates were independent of my feelings.
The chair asked everyone to keep questions relevant to the materials under review.
Afterward, I sat in the hallway beside Aaron.
He told me I had looked calmer than I felt.
I admitted my hands had been shaking beneath the table.
“That’s fine,” he said.
“You answered what you knew.”
Across the hall, Richard spoke quietly with his attorney.
He did not approach us.
I had imagined this moment for months as a confrontation in which I would finally tell him everything I thought about him.
Instead, I drank water from a paper cup and waited for the next witness.
Helen testified about the storage agreement and the signatures she remembered.
She identified her own handwriting and explained why she had refused to release Evelyn’s letters without safeguards for Mara.
Beatrice’s attorney questioned her about the long gap in her memory.
