“That may matter.”
I didn’t care about legal strategy yet.
I cared about one sentence.
“My biological parents didn’t want me.”
I heard myself say it again, softer this time.
Richard’s eyes filled.
“Catherine loved you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I knew her.”
“That isn’t proof.”
“No.” He nodded.
“It isn’t.”
Then he reached carefully into his portfolio—not Margaret’s, but a thin document case he had been carrying beneath his coat.
He removed three photographs and placed them facedown.
“I brought these because I hoped you might ask.”
He turned over the first.
Catherine holding me on a blanket in a park.
The second showed Richard asleep on a sofa with a baby curled against his chest.
The third was Catherine sitting on a kitchen counter, laughing while Richard held me toward the camera.
I studied the photographs until the people in them stopped feeling like strangers and started feeling dangerous in another way.
They contradicted eighteen years of memory.
Not my memories.
Gerald’s version of them.
“Why did Catherine let me go?”
Richard swallowed.
“I don’t know every decision she made after we separated.
Margaret and I found records showing she was struggling and that other adults became involved.
I won’t invent answers I can’t prove.”
That was the first thing he said that made me trust him.
He didn’t build himself into a hero.
He admitted what he didn’t know.
Margaret folded her hands.
“There is another issue we need to discuss tonight.”
I looked at her.
“The slap?”
“Yes.”
My stomach tightened again.
“I don’t want to go back there.”
“You don’t have to return tonight,” she said.
“You’re eighteen.
You can decide where you stay.”
Richard spoke quickly.
“You don’t have to stay with me either.”
I turned toward him.
He lifted both hands slightly.
“I mean that.
Margaret can arrange a hotel room in your name.
Separate room.
Separate key.
You decide tomorrow whether you ever want to see me again.”
I had spent my life around adults who called control love.
His refusal to control me felt almost suspicious.
“What about Gerald?”
Margaret’s answer was immediate.
“If you choose, you can report the assault.
You have witnesses.”
