"She texted me at two in the morning. From upstairs. She thought I was asleep." He almost smiled. "She said, Dad, I think Mom should tell her. And then she said, Also I'm still mad. And then she said, Also are we going to get the pictures from that guy or not, because Grandma is going to ask."
Natalie laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, a wet, startled sound, and it turned into something else halfway through, and she put her head down on the kitchen table and wept, finally, the way she had not wept in the studio, loudly, without shame, her shoulders heaving. Adam did not turn around for a long time. Then he did. He came back to the table and stood beside her chair, and after a moment he put his hand on her back, flat, between her shoulder blades, and left it there.
He did not say anything. He did not have to. It was not forgiveness, not yet. It was something smaller and more durable: a hand left where it was.
* * *
Harbor Family Services had closed in 2019. Natalie learned this on the Monday after the photo session, sitting in her car in the parking lot of the elementary school where she worked as a speech-language pathologist, eating a granola bar for lunch and searching on her phone. The agency's records, according to a brief notice on a website that had not been updated in years, had been transferred to a larger nonprofit called Front Range Family Alliance, which had an office in a converted bank building in Lakewood.
She called. She was put on hold for twenty-two minutes. A woman named Pilar took her information and said she would need to come in person with two forms of identification, and that she should be prepared for the possibility that nothing had been kept. Agencies merged, files were lost, things were thrown away in basements. Natalie said she understood.