“So am I.”
I got into the car.
That night, I sat in the nursery with the clinic folder on my lap and my mother’s letter beside it.
The words on the page had become less mysterious with every answer, but the silence around them remained.
My mother had accepted help in a moment of need, then chosen not to make it part of her story.
Alexander’s father had honored her choice.
Alexander had inherited the account but not the knowledge behind it.
Olivia had taken advantage of the account’s legitimacy.
And Alexander, trusting his own assumptions, had failed to look closely enough.
The past was not a simple chain of secrets leading to one villain.
It was a collection of choices made by people who had wanted, in their different ways, to spare one another pain.
Some of those choices had protected.
Others had harmed.
The next morning, Margaret called Daniel with an update.
