almost vertiginous confusion at how ordinary that object still looked, how it hadn’t somehow transformed itself into evidence of the person who had used it. I think grief, in situations like this, doesn’t
arrive as a single clean wave. It arrives in a thousand small, absurd moments, a coffee maker, a folded newspaper, a particular tone of voice you now have to recontextualize entirely, and each one costs something to process.
I want to describe what happened with Priya, because her eventual recovery represented, for me, the single most important outcome of this entire devastating ordeal.
She was located two days after Richard’s arrest, discovered by local police in a motel roughly ninety miles from our home, having fled there after receiving threats from one of Richard’s associates, a man
who had apparently been sent specifically to locate her and, according to what she eventually told investigators, either force her to hand over the baby or ensure her permanent silence about the
operation entirely.
I visited her in the hospital, where she was being treated for exhaustion and dehydration after days of
hiding without adequate food or water, and I remember the particular, complicated emotion of meeting this young woman whose body had carried the child now sleeping in a bassinet in my own living room.
She was smaller than I expected, and younger looking too, though Ethan had told me she was twenty-six by then, three years past the age listed on that first document I’d seen in the suitcase. Her hands shook
slightly as she reached for mine, and I noticed, with a fresh stab of grief, a thin white scar along one wrist that I didn’t ask about and that she didn’t explain, though I suspected, from something in the careful way
the nurse glanced at it, that it belonged to an earlier, harder chapter of her life than even the one Richard had exploited.
“Thank you,” she told me, her voice still weak, tears falling freely as I described how her daughter was doing, how Ethan had brought her safely to us, how we were caring for her carefully while the
investigation continued. “I didn’t know if I would ever see her again, or if I would even survive long enough to know what happened to her.”
“You’re safe now,” I told her, though I understood, even as I said it, how inadequate those words felt given everything she had survived.
“Your son,” Priya said, wiping her eyes, “he didn’t have to help me. I want you to understand that. I was a stranger to him. He barely knew me. He could have walked away the moment I told him what I needed, and no one would have blamed him for it, given his own father was the one responsible.”
“He’s always been like that,” I said, and felt, saying it, a fierce and sudden pride that momentarily eclipsed the grief. “Even as a small boy. He couldn’t walk past someone who needed help without stopping.”
