That answer reminded Emily of her own first words to Gideon.
For several weeks they exchanged documents through the attorneys.
One form listed Anna as abandoned at the shelter.
Another recorded her mother reporting the child missing hours before the transport.
The reports could not both be accurate.
The second record carried the signature of a shelter nurse who was now retired in Ohio.
Emily asked Rosa whether her uncle might remember the nurse.
Rosa called him that evening.
He did remember her.
Her name was Harriet Bell, and she had insisted on making a duplicate list of everyone moved from the gymnasium.
Rosa’s uncle had helped carry medical supplies during the evacuation and kept a copy of Harriet’s list in his ambulance log.
The list contained Anna’s name and a notation that her mother had been searching for her at the time of departure.
Emily drove to Toledo with Tessa to meet Rosa’s uncle, Raul Alvarez.
Raul was in his seventies and walked with a cane after an injury that ended his ambulance career.
He opened a filing cabinet beneath his television and removed a folder of old incident reports.
“I should have brought this out years ago,” he said.
“Why didn’t you?” Emily asked.
“I thought the county had already fixed the problem.”
He showed them the carbon copy of Harriet’s list.
It included a notation about a second vehicle leaving the gymnasium near midnight.
Raul remembered asking why the children were traveling without their parents.
A man wearing an Eastward badge told him that the reunification site had already been notified.
“I was carrying oxygen bottles and blankets,” Raul said.
“I didn’t follow the bus.”
He looked at Emily with an expression she knew too well.
“You can spend twenty years wondering whether one more question would have changed anything.”
Tessa copied the document and recorded its history.
They sent the relevant portions to Lucia, who read them with Elena in a private meeting.
Elena did not contact Emily immediately.
A month later, she wrote a letter explaining that she needed time to understand what the new information meant.
She had grown up in a loving household and did not want strangers to dismiss that life as an error.
At the same time, she wanted to know whether her birth mother was still alive.
Emily helped the attorneys locate public records of the Serrano family without publishing Elena’s identity.
Anna’s mother, Isabel Serrano, had died eight years earlier.
Her father had moved to Arizona and remarried.
