Instead she became furious on behalf of someone neither of us had met.
“They told a mother her baby died?”
“That’s what Martha claims happened,” I answered.
“We still have to verify it.”
Leah stood beside the kitchen counter with her hair tied in a loose knot.
She had always resembled my mother around the eyes, or so I thought.
Now every resemblance felt both precious and unreliable.
“What if that woman is alive?” she asked.
“She may be,” I said.
“And if she is, she gets to decide whether she wants us to contact her.”
Leah considered that.
“Does she know you exist?”
I said I did not know.
My daughter had once made a scrapbook about our family for a school project.
It included her grandmother’s birthday, a photograph from our first camping trip, and a hand-drawn tree with branches named after relatives.
She brought it downstairs and placed it on the table.
Then she opened to the page where my mother stood in a red sweater holding me as a toddler.
“This doesn’t disappear, right?”
I leaned against the counter because my knees suddenly felt weak.
“No,” I told her.
“None of this disappears.”
We spent the evening looking through photographs instead of searching for more records.
My mother had taken me skating on a frozen pond, taught me to bake bread, and stayed awake during the pneumonia that frightened me at sixteen.
She had sometimes been strict, sometimes impatient, and almost always exhausted from working two jobs.
Whatever the clinic had done, it could not erase those nights beside my hospital bed.
Leah found a photograph of my mother standing with Martha beside the old maple in our backyard.
The date written on the back was five years earlier.
My mother’s smile was hesitant, and Martha held a sealed cake tin.
I had never seen the picture.
On the back my mother had written, “She finally told me the rest.”
I read the sentence aloud.
Leah looked up sharply.
“Grandma knew something.”
“Yes,” I said.
“But she might have known less than Martha thinks.”
I called Dana and sent her a photograph of the inscription.
Then I set the album on the shelf and told Leah we needed a normal evening.
We watched a bad mystery movie and argued about its ending.
For two hours, the truth could wait without being abandoned.
When Leah went to bed, she paused in the doorway.
“If we find Ruth, don’t make her the answer to everything.”
