The gesture was the same one she remembered from the boy who talked endlessly about planets.
He stood still before Walter, uncertain how to begin.
Walter held out his hand, then lowered it when Peter stepped forward and embraced him.
For several minutes they spoke too quietly for Emily to hear.
Leah sat beside her on the bench.
“He was afraid this would erase the family he already has,” she said.
“It doesn’t have to.”
“I keep telling him that.”
Leah described years in which Peter had wondered why his childhood records contained contradictions.
His adoptive family had been told he had no known relatives.
They had loved him and believed the information given to them.
Learning about Walter did not make that love less real.
It made Peter angry at the adults who denied him the chance to know both parts of his life.
Emily listened without offering a solution.
She had learned that some truths did not arrive with a clean place to put them.
After an hour, Peter asked to speak to her alone.
They walked along the pond while Walter and Leah waited near the entrance.
“You really remember the paper stars?” he asked.
“I remember you telling me mine looked like a crooked fish.”
Peter laughed.
“It probably did.”
“You insisted the points had to be even.”
“I still do that with everything.”
They reached a wooden bridge where children were throwing bread to ducks despite a sign asking them not to.
Peter leaned against the railing.
“I saw the school assignment you found,” he said.
“I almost didn’t believe it was mine.”
“You drew Saturn on the back.”
“I drew Saturn on everything.”
He looked at her carefully.
“Do you remember the woman in the blue scarf?”
Emily nodded.
“Only a little.”
“She told me I was going somewhere safe, but she wouldn’t let me say goodbye to my mother.”
Peter’s voice tightened.
“For years I thought I had forgotten to tell Mom where I was going.”
Emily felt the terrible weight of that belief.
“You were a child.”
“I know that now.”
“You weren’t responsible for what adults did.”
Peter stared at the water.
“Part of me still feels as if I left her.”
Emily did not rush to tell him the feeling was irrational.
She understood how a childhood memory could survive long after a person learned the facts around it.
Instead she told him that Walter had kept the green lunchbox and that his mother wrote to him every birthday.
