Chapter 4: The Address
I opened the smaller envelope at Rachel's insistence.
"Don't you dare wait," she said.
Inside was a folded index card.
An address written in the same handwriting.
A town I didn't recognize — Millhaven — and below the street address, one additional line.
*Ask for Carol.*
Rachel pulled out her phone and searched the town.
Small community, two hours north.
Population under four thousand.
"Carol," she said.
"That's not her name."
"It's the name she's using."
"How long has she been there?"
"I don't know."
"Daniel, if she's been two hours away this entire time—"
"I know."
"Twelve years."
"Rachel.
I know."
She stood up and walked to the window.
Her shoulders were tight.
"He told us she was sick for months," she said.
"We watched her get weaker.
We sat with her.
We said goodbye."
"Yes."
"Was any of it real?"
That question sat in the room like something heavy.
"I think she was sick," I said slowly.
"The decline felt real.
But somewhere in those final weeks — something changed.
Something happened between her and Dad that we didn't see."
"Or he arranged the whole thing."
"I don't know yet."
Sarah had come to stand in the kitchen doorway again.
"Are you going today?" she said.
"Yes."
"Do you want me to come?"
I thought about the note.
*Go there alone first.*
"Not this time," I said.
"I'm sorry."
Sarah nodded once.
She didn't argue.
That was one of the things I had always loved about her — she understood when something needed to be mine first.
Rachel turned from the window.
"I'm coming," she said.
It was not a question.
"The note said alone."
"The note said you.
It didn't say anything about me."
I almost smiled.
Almost.
We left within the hour.
The drive north was mostly quiet.
Rachel watched the fields go by.
I kept both hands on the wheel and tried not to think too far ahead.
Every time I pictured pulling up to an address and knocking on a door, my mind went blank.
I didn't know what to prepare for.
I didn't know what version of my mother I was going to find — if I found her at all.
"What if it's not her?" Rachel said, somewhere around the forty-minute mark.
"Then we figure out who it is and why they have that key."
"And if it is her?"
I didn't answer right away.
"Then I need to understand why she let us grieve her for twelve years," I said.
"And why she only reached out now.
Through an eight-year-old."
Rachel turned to look at me.
"You're angry."
"I'm trying not to be."
"That's not the same thing."
"No," I said.
"It isn't."
We reached Millhaven just after noon.
The town was exactly what the search had suggested — quiet streets, a small main road, a diner, a post office, a hardware store with a hand-painted sign.
The address on the card led us to a residential street three blocks from the center of town.
A white house with a green door.
A small garden out front, well kept.
A wind chime on the porch that turned slowly in the breeze.
Rachel and I sat in the car for a moment.
"Ready?" she said.
"No," I said.
We got out anyway.
I knocked.
Footsteps inside.
A pause — the kind of pause that felt like someone checking through a window first.
Then the door opened.
The woman standing in the doorway had white hair and a thin face and gray eyes that I had been looking at in photographs my entire life.
She was older.
Thinner.
There were lines in her face that hadn't been there in the lake house photograph.
But it was her.
It was my mother.
Her hand came up to her mouth.
May you like
"Daniel," she whispered.
And behind me, I heard Rachel make a sound I had never heard from her before — something between a breath and a word that didn't quite become either.
