In her photograph, she held one elbow the same way Aria always did when she felt nervous.
“That’s her.”
“Because she looks like Clara?”
“No. Because she looks like herself.”
Jackson offered to reach out for me, but I declined.
I deleted two drafts—one too cold, the other too angry.
At last, I wrote:
“Aria, I don’t know what you were told.
I only know that I loved you when you left, and I’ve loved you every day since.
I found the note you hid. Nothing that happened was the fault of a nine-year-old girl. I won’t come unless you ask me.”
I included my phone number and address, then pressed send and prayed.
She called that night.
After a long silence, she finally asked,
“Did you know where we were?”
“No.”
“You never came.”
“I didn’t know where to go.”
“Gwen said you left with another woman.”
“She lied.”
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.”
