Chapter 9 - Everything We Were Owed
Sandra Kessler drove down from Worcester that Saturday.
She was a small woman in her late sixties, with Eileen's careful eyes, and she carried a canvas bag in both hands like there was something breakable inside it.
She sat at my kitchen table and unpacked it — Eileen's copy of the agency document, and a second envelope I hadn't seen.
"Eileen wrote a letter," Sandra said. "Before she died. She addressed it to Mark, but she told me to use my judgment about when he should have it." She slid it across the table. "I think now is when."
Mark picked it up. Turned it over. Set it back down.
"I'll read it in a minute," he said. "Tell me about the agency first."
Sandra nodded. "The woman who ran it was named Frances Kohl. She worked out of a private office in Concord from the late fifties into the mid-seventies. No license. She called herself a consultant — somebody who arranged private placements between families." Sandra folded her hands. "Eileen found her name on the document. After Eileen passed, I did some digging. Frances Kohl died in 1989. But her case files got bought up by a licensed agency in New Hampshire when she closed her doors. That agency is still open."
"So the records still exist," Kayla said.
"Possibly, yes."
"Which means somewhere there's paperwork on every deal she ever made. Every mother she lied to."
"That's what I believe."
Chris had driven up that morning and was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. "What would it take to get at those records?"
"A lawyer," Sandra said. "Maybe a court order, depending how they were sealed. But given that the original arrangements were made under fraud—" She paused. "There's an argument that the usual privacy rules don't protect them the same way."
Mark had been quiet since Sandra arrived — the particular quiet that means he's working something through, not gone.
"How many cases do you think there were?" he asked.
"I don't know. Eileen's document made it look like Frances Kohl ran a real operation. The fees were structured. The language was professional. None of it was improvised." Sandra looked at him. "I think there were a lot."
Mark nodded slowly. He picked up Eileen's letter and turned it over one more time.
"I'm going to read this now. If that's all right."
Nobody spoke.
He opened it carefully, the way you open something you can't reseal. Two pages of Eileen's handwriting — I could see it from across the table, neat, slightly slanted, the hand of a woman who'd been careful with a pen her whole life.
He read. We waited.
When he finished he folded the pages, held them in both hands, and looked out the window a while.
"She says she's sorry," he said. "She says when she took me, she didn't know my mother had been lied to. She says if she'd known, she'd have done it another way." He paused. "She says she hopes I find her. She hopes she's somebody worth finding."
I pressed my hand flat on the table.
"She also says—" His voice shifted. "She says the scar on my stomach was from a surgery the day I was born. She says the doctor told her it healed well. She says she used to trace it when I was a baby and asleep, and she'd think about the woman who carried me, and wonder if she was all right."
The kitchen was dead still.
"She was thinking about you," Sandra said softly, to me. "Even back then."
I couldn't speak for a minute.
Mark looked across the table at me. "She was right," he said. "You are someone worth finding."
Kayla made a small sound and turned toward the window.
Chris uncrossed his arms and came and sat down at the table.
"Okay," he said, in the voice he uses when he's ready to fix something. "Here's what we do. I know a family law attorney in Pittsburgh who's handled adoption record cases. I call her Monday morning. We get the files from that New Hampshire agency. We find out how many families Frances Kohl did this to. And we make sure every one of them gets the chance to know what we know now."
He looked around the table. "Everyone good with that?"
Mark looked at me. I looked at Mark.
"Yes," we said. At the same second. In the same low voice.
Kayla turned back from the window. Her eyes were red but her voice held. "I want to help. Whatever you need."
Mark looked at her across the table. Seven years of marriage. A legal void. A whole world that had to be rebuilt from the studs.
"I know," he said. "I know you do."
May you like
It wasn't forgiveness, not yet. It wasn't a resolution. But it was the two of them in the same room, both choosing to stay in it. That was enough for the day.
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