Replies, mostly form letters.
Denials.
Dead ends.
The paper trail of forty years of searching.
I opened a box from fourteen years ago.
Inside, beneath a stack of legal correspondence, was a photograph I hadn’t seen before.
Eleanor, older now, standing outside a building I recognized.
The building where I had worked before I started volunteering.
A candid shot, slightly blurry, taken from a distance.
She had found me before she found me.
She had stood outside my workplace.
She had not gone in.
I sat down on the floor of the storage unit with the photograph in my hands and tried to understand what it meant to want something that much and still choose to wait.
To choose to let it happen gently, or not at all.
At the bottom of the same box was a small notebook.
I opened it to the last written page.
*Saw her today going into the building on Clement Street.
