I’m safe. Please tell Owen he can stop searching for me. Mum and I moved because of her work. Nothing happened to me.
I read those sentences twice. Then a third time, because I wanted something in them to make Derek’s version possible.
“That’s what you sent?”
“The copy was made before I posted it.”
I reached toward the receipt. Ruth slid it closer, keeping one finger on the edge.
I knew the signature. Derek made the first letter too big and crowded the rest against it. I’d seen it on birthday cards, deliveries, the forms he sometimes signed when I couldn’t leave the counter.
“That’s yours.”
He glanced at it. “Looks like it.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve said I may have received something.”
“You signed for this.”
“Yes, Owen.”
The impatience in his voice nearly worked. I had spent years being his younger brother. I could feel myself wanting to stop asking the same question, to avoid making a scene in my own café. Ruth stood beside the chair with her coat still on. She had already waited longer than either of us had any right to ask.
“Why didn’t you give it to me?”
“I don’t remember making a decision about it.”
“You didn’t need to make a decision. It was for me.”
“It was addressed to me.”
Ruth lowered the letter a few inches. “Because your details were on the notice.”
I looked at the top of the page. There was her name, the date, an address. A real place where, twenty years earlier, she could have received an answer.
“You had somewhere to write back,” I said to Derek. “You could have checked. If you weren’t sure, you could have asked her.”
“She wasn’t asking you to come there.”
“I didn’t say she was.”
“You’re looking at the address as though that changes everything. She said, ‘Please don’t give Owen our address. If he wants to write, send it through you.’”
Ruth went still.
I hadn’t reached the bottom of the letter. I bent closer. Under her request to stop searching, beneath a few lines about her mother, I found it.
Please don’t give Owen our address. If he wants to write, send it through you.
I read it without speaking. His words matched the page.
I asked Ruth, “Was this ever printed anywhere?”
“No. It was a private letter.”
“Well, apparently I remember some of it now.” Derek looked toward the front window.
“You remembered that part before I read it.”
“I can see the paper.”
“From there?”
He was standing at the end of the table. The letter faced me, still held in Ruth’s hands.
He didn’t answer.
I had imagined finding her so often that I knew what I would say, where we would sit, which childhood things I would bring up. I had never imagined reading a request to leave her alone while my brother tried to explain why he hadn’t passed it on.
“Why?” I asked. “Not why you forgot. Why you kept doing this.”
Derek pressed his palms against the chair back.
“The first notice brought people out,” he said. “People who hadn’t spoken to us in years. They asked what they could do. They called me.”
“And you couldn’t tell them you’d heard from her?”
“I meant to. At first.”
Ruth put the letter down, covering the address with the receipt.
Derek watched her do it. “Then it was another year. Everyone expected something. You expected something.”
“I expected news.”
“You asked me to help.”
“With finding her.”
He pulled the chair out again and sat this time. “I liked having something people needed me for. There. That’s what you want me to say.”
It wasn’t. I wanted an answer I could carry without thinking of every evening I had thanked him.
I turned to Ruth. “How long have you known we were still doing it?”
