I heard her take a sharp breath.
“Meet me tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“The auditorium where I work.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Come alone.”
The next afternoon, I found her straightening rows of chairs that were already perfectly aligned.
For a brief moment, I saw the little girl I’d lost.
Then the woman she had become stepped back.
“You came.”
“I promised.”
“Why did you stop looking?”
My first instinct was to defend myself.
Instead, I sat down.
“Tell me what you remember.”
She remembered Clara crying at the motel while Gwen insisted I had chosen another woman. Shaun kept asking when I would arrive. After Clara’s car overheated near the bridge, Gwen drove them away in her own car.
That night, Clara suffered a stroke that affected both her speech and memory. Gwen moved them to another state, controlled Clara’s phone calls and letters, and convinced them I knew where they were but no longer wanted them.
They lived under Clara’s maiden name, which Aria later adopted legally. No one connected them to the family everyone believed had died in the river.
Aria waited for me.
I never came.
“When I got older, I remembered the mattress,” she said. “I knew you’d never seen the note.”
Her voice trembled.
“It was my fault.”
“No.”
“I hid it.”
“You were nine.”
“Being nine doesn’t change what I did.”
“It changes who was responsible. I hid the truth too.”
She stared at me in silence.
I told her about Sarah and about Clara’s questions years earlier.
“You hid a letter because you were scared,” I said. “I hid behind silence because I was proud. Only one of us was an adult.”
Aria covered her face.
“I ruined our family.”
“The adults around you made choices. You didn’t make them for us.”
She slowly lowered her hands.
“Did you really search?”
I opened my bag and spread out police reports, newspaper clippings, letters, and receipts from private investigators.
“I never stopped.”
Aria picked up one clipping before reaching for my hand.
Shaun refused to see me.
I didn’t push him.
Instead, I mailed him the silver watch.
My note read:
“It still loses four minutes a day. I kept winding it anyway.”
Three days later, he called.
“You really wound this every week?”
“Every Sunday.”
“Aria says you searched.”
“I did.”
