paying for medicine, and they kept telling themselves the next month would be easier. A notice had gone to their former mailing address, another had arrived while Evelyn was hospitalized, and now fees had grown around the original debt like weeds around a fence. They had eighteen days to respond before the county moved the case another step toward a forced sale.
"Why didn't you tell anyone?" Daniel asked. Walter's shoulders tightened. "Because it was our responsibility." Evelyn took the paper from her husband and folded it carefully, refusing to let the whole room become a witness to their troubles. "We tried the office," she explained. "They gave us forms and a telephone number, and the telephone number gave us another number. Every time we thought we understood what to do, another letter arrived." Daniel wanted to say that he could clear the debt before lunch. The impulse was so powerful that it frightened him, because it sounded less like help than a way of erasing forty years in a single afternoon.
"Let me get somebody who understands the forms," he said instead. "No decisions without you. I won't ask you to sign anything today." Evelyn studied him, still trying to reconcile the boy who had once hidden vegetables in his napkin with this polished man speaking about legal assistance. "We don't want you to think you have to buy your way back into the family," she said. Daniel's face changed. "That's exactly what I was afraid you'd think," he admitted. Walter leaned across the table and covered his hand. "Then don't do it that way. Come to supper. We can talk about the rest afterward."
He went with them that afternoon, not in the limousine but in Walter's aging sedan, while Lewis followed at a discreet distance. The Whitcomb house was smaller than Daniel remembered, its white paint worn near the porch steps and the flower beds nearly empty for winter. Inside, the kitchen still smelled faintly of cinnamon, and a wooden shelf displayed photographs of neighbors' weddings, foster children who had stayed for a season, and a dog that had died long before Daniel became a businessman. On the highest shelf stood a picture of a teenage boy beside a repaired red bicycle. Daniel touched the frame with one finger and found he could not speak.
Evelyn showed him a tin box of letters. Some had been returned with stamps, some had never been mailed because they had no address, and a few contained nothing more than questions they wanted to ask when he returned. There were drawings of birthday cakes and school buses, newspaper clippings about scholarships, and the photograph from the steps that Daniel had carried in his briefcase. Walter admitted that after five years he had stopped going to the social services office because each visit left Evelyn crying on the drive home. But he had never let her throw away the box. "Keeping it wasn't the same as finding you," he said. "It was just the only thing we knew how to do."
Daniel told them what had finally led him back. Earlier that year, a retired caseworker's daughter had found an old bundle of misdirected correspondence while organizing files her mother had kept after leaving public service. She had contacted the agency, which located Daniel through public business records and forwarded copies of the letters.