Chapter 6: The Second Envelope
The second envelope held forty-three pages.
Claire sat in that corner booth for over an hour.
Nora ordered more coffee and said almost nothing.
She answered questions when Claire asked them and stayed quiet when she didn't.
The records were methodical.
Payments to Patricia Hale.
Payments to a private investigator named Roy Carver, going back four years — starting, Claire realized with a slow cold understanding, six months before they had brought Mia home.
A series of payments to an account Nora identified as belonging to a woman named Gail Mercer, who had provided a written statement describing Claire as emotionally volatile and an unfit caregiver.
"Who is Gail Mercer?" Claire asked.
"She was your neighbor on Alderton Street.
Before you moved."
Claire thought back.
A woman with a small dog.
A woman who had waved from her driveway.
A woman Claire had spoken to perhaps a dozen times in two years.
"He paid her to write a statement about me."
"Yes."
"And Roy Carver.
The investigator.
Four years." Claire set the page down.
"He hired someone to follow me before we even adopted Mia."
"He hired Roy Carver to document your fitness as a parent," Nora said.
"From the beginning.
Before the adoption was finalized."
"Why?" Claire's voice was quiet.
Not shaking.
Just quiet.
"If he wanted Mia, why go through the adoption at all?
Why bring me into it?"
Nora wrapped both hands around her mug.
"Because he needed you.
At the time, he couldn't adopt as a single man — not easily, not quickly.
He needed a two-parent household.
He needed a wife who would be a good mother, who would raise Mia well, who the courts would approve." She paused.
"And then, once Mia was established and settled and attached to you — once you had done the hard work of the early years — he was going to remove you."
The diner felt very far away.
"He used me," Claire said.
Nora didn't answer.
She didn't need to.
Claire looked at the pages spread across the table.
Four years of her life.
Every morning she had gotten up early with Mia.
Every fever, every nightmare, every first word and first step.
Every moment she had believed she was building something real.
"Does he know you have these?" she asked.
"No.
Roy Carver has a drinking problem and a conscience that activates when he's had enough.
He came to me three months ago.
He felt — I don't know what he felt.
Guilty, maybe.
He gave me copies of everything."
"Will he testify to that?"
Nora looked at her steadily.
"I already asked him.
He said yes."
Claire gathered the pages carefully and put them back in the envelope.
She folded the envelope and placed it in her bag.
Then she sat for a moment with her hands flat on the table.
"I need a lawyer," she said.
"I know someone," Nora said.
"She's not Patricia Hale.
She's better."
Claire looked across the table at the woman she had sl\*pped the day before.
At the woman who had put her daughter in a hole in the ground to get her attention.
At the woman who had, in the end, handed her the only thing that could protect Mia.
"Why did you really do this?" Claire asked.
"Not the pit.
This.
All of it.
Why not just disappear?
You signed the papers.
You could have walked away."
Nora was quiet for a moment.
"Because she calls you Mama," she said.
"And she should.
You earned that." She looked out the window.
"But she's also mine.
And I was not going to let him use either of us and walk away clean."
Claire picked up her bag.
"Send me the lawyer's name," she said.
She stood up, dropped cash on the table, and walked out into the gray morning air.
Her phone was already in her hand before she reached the car.
She didn't call Daniel.
She called her sister.
"I need you to come," she said when Ruth picked up.
"Bring the kids if you have to.
But I need you here tonight."
"Claire.
What happened?"
"I'll explain everything when you get here." She unlocked the car.
May you like
"And Ruth — don't tell anyone you're coming.
Not anyone."
