“She asked me to find you.”
My throat tightened. “Then why wait until I was eighteen?”
Mrs. Hale smiled sadly. “Because I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That you’d refuse to let me into your life.”
She opened a drawer. Inside sat a thick folder, and she handed it to me. My hands shook as I opened it. Photographs, report cards, school awards, newspaper clippings, school newsletters. Years of them. My entire childhood.
I stared, page after page.
Evidence that someone had been paying attention, that someone had cared, even when I didn’t know it.
“You followed me.”
Mrs. Hale nodded. “From a distance.”
I turned another page, then another. Addresses she’d managed to track down. School photographs she’d collected. Notes from people who had crossed paths with me over the years.
Every page represented another attempt not to
