I stared at them.
My mother had trusted Caleb before I was old enough to remember him.
Now I had to decide whether I had been foolish to do the same.
Then another memory surfaced.
Months before I knew I was pregnant, Caleb and I had been sitting on his couch when he casually asked whether I had owned a red bicycle as a child.
I laughed and told him yes, that Mom had bought it secondhand.
He smiled at the ceiling like someone who had finally answered a question he’d carried for twenty years.
The bookstore.
He had walked in during the Q&A.
He hadn’t found me by accident.
And every time I complained about the wealthy family my mother once worked for—how she lost everything afterward and died still feeling ashamed—Caleb listened without saying a word.
He had known exactly who I was talking about.
—
At sunrise, I strapped Nora into her car seat and drove to the address written on the oldest envelope.
The house seemed smaller than I remembered.
The garden looked almost exactly the same.
