“We should give this to Caroline,” Aaron said.

“We should find the proper investigator first,” I replied.

I had spent the previous day learning how easily private pain could become public spectacle.

I did not want my father’s unfinished apology to become another weapon in Richard’s personal war.

CHAPTER 9: A Woman Named Mara

On Monday morning, Caroline sent me a message containing a telephone number and a single line of text.

“She called again, and she says she will speak to you.”

I asked why Mara wanted me specifically.

Caroline said Mara had read my father’s name in a document from Alder House.

We arranged a meeting at a community center with an advocate from a local family services organization present.

Mara arrived carrying a canvas bag and wearing a denim jacket with a missing button.

She looked older than the girl in the photographs, with lines around her eyes that made her expression difficult to read.

I did not mention her resemblance to Richard.

I introduced myself and asked whether she preferred to sit near the door.

She chose a chair facing the windows.

“You found his letter,” she said.

I asked how she knew.

“Your father told me he kept something,” she answered.

“I hoped it was still there.”

She explained that her parents had separated when she was sixteen.

After Evelyn died, Richard brought her to another state and told her not to contact the people who had known her at Alder House.

When she turned eighteen, she left his home after a series of arguments about her mother’s papers.

Richard told relatives she was mentally unstable and refused to share her address.

Over time, acquaintances began repeating a story that she had died overseas.

“Did you ever ask him to correct it?” I asked.

“I wrote to him for years,” Mara said.

“He sent the letters back unopened.”

She had changed her surname after marrying, then lost contact with the few people who remembered her childhood.

Only recently had she returned to investigate what happened at Alder House.

“Why now?” I asked.

Mara touched a small notebook on her lap.

“One of the missing children contacted me,” she said.

I looked at Caroline, who appeared as surprised as I felt.

Mara turned the notebook so we could see a date and an address.

“She’s alive,” Mara said.

“And she wants somebody to explain why she was told that nobody had ever looked for her.”