Whitmore took the chair across from me, folding his hands on the table. I apologize for the circumstances of this meeting. It’s not how I’d imagined this moment. He shook his head slightly. Your father left instructions to locate you, but you weren’t at your last known address. Your phone numbers were disconnected, and your name changed when you married. We hired investigators. They traced you to the house in Huntersville, but by the time they got there, you were gone. The foreclosure, the move, you disappeared from every database we could access. When your social security number came through the state assistance system just now, it flagged with the firm we contracted. They called me immediately.
My father’s been gone for 20 years. Gone? Yes. Dead? No. He reached into his briefcase and withdrew a folder. Thomas Caldwell died 3 years ago in San Diego. He’d been living there since 2005. I couldn’t process what he was saying. My father had been alive all those years, living in San Diego, 3,000 mi away, while I grew up thinking he’d abandoned us. I don’t. I stopped, started again. Why didn’t he contact us?
He tried for years. Whitmore opened the folder and spread papers across the table. Letters, dozens of them. These are copies. The originals are in our files. Letters he wrote to you and your sister starting in 2004. Birthday cards, Christmas cards. All of them returned unopened. I stared at the handwriting. It was familiar. I could almost remember it from permission slips and report cards from a time before he left. My mother sent them back. Everyone. Eventually, he stopped sending them to your home address and started sending them to our office, hoping we could find another way to reach you. But you were a minor and your mother had full custody, and there wasn’t much we could legally do.
