I looked at the envelope again.
“Who returned this?”
Lucas pulled something else from the suitcase.
A second envelope.
This one had been mailed two months later.
Then a third.
Then a fourth.
All addressed to me.
All returned.
All with the same handwritten words across the front.
RETURN TO SENDER.
Margaret had tried four times.
Four.
I stared at them.
“The handwriting.”
Douglas nodded.
I knew before he said it.
“It wasn’t the post office.”
“No.”
“Was it my mother’s?”
“No.”
“Then whose?”
Lucas placed one final envelope on my lap.
It was older than Margaret’s letters.
Much older.
Postmarked July 1987.
Addressed to my mother.
The return address belonged to someone named Marianne Webb.
Across the back was a single handwritten sentence.
Evelyn, Thomas cannot know where she is.
I read it twice.
“Where who is?”
“We assumed the baby.”
“But you don’t know.”
“No.”
