Chapter 3 - DollyI called my daughter-in-law and asked her to come home early. Then I grabbed the sweater and drove straight to Chloe's school, my hands still shaking on the wheel the entire way.
At the front office, I asked for Dolly. The receptionist told me she was finishing up her shift near the gymnasium. I waited by the entrance, the sweater folded over my arm like evidence.
Five minutes later, a woman in her early thirties came through the double doors pushing a cleaning cart, and the second her eyes landed on me, she stopped cold.
Her gaze dropped straight to the sweater.
"You must be Margaret," she said quietly.
I didn't like that she already knew my name before I'd said a word. "You gave this to my granddaughter."
"Yes."
"Why?"
She glanced toward the office, toward the school secretary visible through the glass. "Could we talk somewhere more private?"
"No." My voice came out sharper than I intended, but I didn't try to soften it. "I've spent forty years waiting for someone to tell me the truth. You can start right here."
Her eyes filled, but she didn't look away.
I held up the wooden charm between two fingers. "Who gave you this sweater?"
"My mother."
"What's her name?"
She hesitated, and something in her face made my heart start pounding before she even answered.
"Please," I said. "Don't make me pull every single word out of you."
Tears spilled down her cheeks. "Laura."
The name hit me wrong for half a second before I remembered — she wouldn't know Diane by the nickname only our family used.
"Diane," I said. "Diane is your mother."
"Yes."
I actually sat down right there on the bench outside the office, my legs giving out from under me. "Is she alive?"
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"Yes."
For forty years I had built a hundred different endings for my sister's story in my head. Not one of them looked anything like this.
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