He refused to answer to Daniel for weeks, then began doing so when adults withheld privileges until he complied.
Emily felt physically sick.
The harm was not a dramatic single act.
It was the daily work of convincing a frightened child that his own memories were unreliable.
After six months, Marian’s mother received a transfer order.
Peter was sent to a private residential program called North Harbor House.
The order listed no family contacts.
“Where was that program?” Walter asked.
Marian gave the address.
Emily wrote it down with careful hands.
The building had since become a medical office, but a former caseworker might still have records.
Marian retrieved an envelope from the house.
It contained a school assignment Peter had written during his stay.
The assignment asked children to describe someone who made them feel safe.
Peter wrote about a girl in a red raincoat who shared crackers and showed him how to fold paper stars.
Emily read the uneven handwriting without moving.
For years she had remembered Peter as a boy who disappeared from her childhood.
Now she knew he had remembered her too.
“Why didn’t you give this to his family?” she asked.
Marian lowered her eyes.
“I didn’t know where they were.”
“You could have asked.”
“I did ask my mother.”
“And when she refused?”
Marian drew a slow breath.
“I stopped asking.”
Emily let the answer stand.
Marian did not deserve relief merely for telling the truth twenty years later.
She did deserve the chance to tell it accurately.
“Will you give a statement?” Emily asked.
“Yes.”
“Even if it describes what your mother did?”
“Especially then.”
When the call ended, Walter asked Emily to leave the phone connected while she drove home.
He spoke little.
Once, near a highway rest stop, he asked whether Peter had been warm and fed at the group home.
Marian had said he was.
Emily repeated the answer because Walter needed at least one small fact that did not hurt.
At the end of the drive, he spoke again.
“If he’s alive, don’t rush him.”
“I won’t.”
“He may have a family who knows him by a different name.”
Emily thought of Danny and all the ordinary years their family had shared after the flood.
“Then we start by asking whether he wants to be found,” she said.
Walter thanked her in a voice that shook.
Chapter Twelve: The Price of a Search
Emily’s search began to cost money long before it produced anything that felt like progress.
