"Ruth Hollis passed away in March," Calvin said. "Ovarian cancer. She was diagnosed about two years ago. She brought Claire in last August for her seventeenth, and she'd lost her hair by then, she had on a scarf, and she wanted to be in the picture for the first time. Seventeen years of portraits and she'd never once been in one, after that first morning. She said she didn't want to crowd the frame. Last year she let me put her in. Her and Claire, side by side, on that bench." He nodded toward it, toward where Natalie was sitting. "I went to the funeral. Saint Francis de Sales. Half the middle schoolers in Denver were there."
Natalie had set the mug down on the floor beside the bench, very carefully, as if it were full of something that might explode.
"In August, Claire came in by herself," Calvin said. "It was her eighteenth birthday. Martin had offered to come, but she wanted to do it alone. She sat right where you're sitting and I took her picture, and afterward she asked if she could see the file. All of it. So I put it up on the screen. And she went through every one, one at a time, all the way back, and when she got to the first one, she sat there for a long time. And then she asked me if you'd ever come back. Her mother had always told her you might. And I said no."
He looked at Natalie.
"She's applied for her original birth certificate," he said. "Colorado lets you do that now, when you turn eighteen. She's got your name. Natalie Pruett. She's been looking. She told me she found a few Natalie Pruetts on the internet and none of them were you. She asked if I had an address. I didn't, and I told her so, and that was true."
"And tonight," Natalie said.