Chapter 4: Someone Else Is Looking
I didn't sleep.
Alan was still awake when I came back to our room.
He took one look at my face and sat up.
"Tell me," he said.
I told him everything.
The letter.
Carol.
The photograph.
The Instagram messages.
And the last part — that someone else had been looking for Iris, and that Carol had refused to say who over a message.
Alan was quiet through all of it.
When I finished, he sat with his hands on his knees for a moment.
"We need to meet her," he said.
"I know."
"Soon."
"I know, Alan."
He looked at me.
"How are you?"
"I don't know yet."
He reached over and took my hand.
We sat like that for a while without speaking.
In the morning, I went back to Iris's room before she was up.
I knocked and she called me in.
She was still in bed, phone face-down on the pillow beside her.
"Have you replied to Carol's last message?" I asked.
"Not yet.
I didn't know if I should."
"Reply today.
Tell her we'd like to meet.
All three of us."
Iris looked at me carefully.
"You're not angry?"
"I'm not angry."
"You were scared last night.
I could see it."
"I was," I said.
"I still am.
But not at you.
Never at you."
She picked up her phone.
I watched her type the message and send it before she'd talked herself out of it.
Carol replied within the hour.
She suggested a coffee shop in a town about forty minutes from us — neutral ground, she said, somewhere quiet.
She proposed the following Saturday.
She said she would bring the box.
Iris showed me the message.
I read it twice.
"Saturday," I said.
"Saturday," Iris agreed.
The week moved slowly.
Iris was quieter than usual, but not in a bad way — more like she was turning something over in her mind, examining it from different angles.
I gave her space.
Alan checked in with her every evening, casually, the way he always had, asking about her day and making her laugh at the dinner table.
On Thursday evening, Iris came into the kitchen while I was washing up.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Always."
She leaned against the counter.
"Do you think about them?
Her biological parents, I mean.
Do you ever wonder about them?"
I turned off the tap.
"Yes.
More than you might think."
"What do you wonder?"
"I wonder what they were like.
Whether she has her mother's laugh or her father's stubbornness." I looked at her.
"I wonder if they would have liked us."
Iris smiled at that — a small, real smile.
"I think about them sometimes," she said.
"Not in a sad way.
More like — they're part of the story.
They're part of how I got here."
"They are."
She was quiet for a moment.
"What if the person Carol mentioned — the one looking for me — what if it's someone from their side of the family?
Someone who wants something?"
I had been thinking the same thing all week.
"Then we deal with it together," I said.
"Whatever it is."
"You're not going to tell me not to worry?"
"No.
Because you're smart enough to know that would be a lie."
She laughed softly.
"Okay.
Good."
Saturday came grey and cool.
We drove the forty minutes mostly in silence, Iris in the back seat with her hands folded in her lap, Alan navigating without being asked.
The coffee shop was small — four tables by the window, a counter with a chalkboard menu, the smell of something baking.
A woman was already seated at the far table.
Late sixties, silver hair cut short, a large cardboard box on the chair beside her.
She stood when she saw us.
Her eyes went straight to Iris, and she pressed one hand briefly over her mouth.
"You look exactly like her," she said.
"Exactly like your mother."
Iris went very still beside me.
Carol looked at me then.
Her expression shifted — something careful moving behind her eyes.
"Thank you for coming," she said.
"I need to tell you something before we sit down.
Something I should have put in the letter eleven years ago."
She glanced at the door, then back at us.
"The person looking for Iris — it isn't family.
May you like
It's a solicitor.
And the reason he's looking is because Iris has been named in a will."
