“Not immediately.
I hated him for keeping you from me.
He hated himself more.
But he was ill, and he believed Constance’s secret should come from her own mouth.
He asked me to help him organize the evidence and wait until all of you were together.”
“You could have told me at any time.”
“Yes.”
Her answer held no excuse.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I had spent thirty-nine years imagining the moment.
In every version, you ran into my arms.
Then I met you, and you looked at me as though I had come to rob your mother’s grave.
I understood that the truth would not simply give you another mother.
It would take away the one you thought you knew.”
That hurt because it was true.
I remembered every suspicious glance, every shortened visit, every time Dorothy had tried to ask about my childhood and I had answered with cold politeness.
I had thought she was collecting information to imitate Constance.
She had been trying to know her daughter.
The image on the television changed again.
Edward now held a second folder.
“There is more,” he said.
“Constance did not act alone.
Someone accepted money to keep Dorothy away after she found us.”
Claire’s head lifted.
Frank stepped toward the television again.
“Enough.”
I placed myself between him and the machine.
Dad opened a ledger.
Several checks had been clipped to the pages.
“After Constance died, I found these inside her safe-deposit box.
For years, she paid a private investigator to intercept Dorothy’s letters and report every attempt she made to contact Harper.
When the investigator retired, someone else took over.”
He held a contract toward the camera.
The signature at the bottom appeared only briefly, but I recognized the sharp downward stroke of the last letter.
Frank Nelson.
My brother went completely still.
Claire whispered, “Frank, what did you do?”
He recovered almost instantly.
“I was twenty-two.
Mom was sick.
She asked me to handle some mail.
That’s all.”
Dorothy rose from the bed.
“You came to my apartment.”
Frank looked at her.
For the first time that day, his confidence cracked.
“You told me Harper knew the truth and wanted nothing to do with me,” Dorothy continued.
“You gave me a letter in her name.”
She opened her small suitcase and removed an envelope from beneath the shawl.
The paper was yellowed along the edges.
I took it from her.
The handwriting resembled mine, but the loops were too deliberate.
The letter said I had learned about the adoption, considered Constance my only mother, and would seek a restraining order if Dorothy contacted me again.
At the bottom was my forged signature.
“Why?” I asked Frank.
