She went on Thursday, after work. The office smelled of carpet cleaner and burnt coffee. Pilar turned out to be a young woman with a nose ring and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she checked Natalie's driver's license and her marriage certificate and her original birth certificate, and then disappeared through a door for so long that Natalie began to believe she had been forgotten. When Pilar came back, she was carrying a brown accordion folder held closed with a rubber band, the rubber band so old it had fused to the cardboard.
"This was in your file," she said, and set it on the counter. "It's addressed to you. Some of it's been opened by the agency, for screening, that's standard, but most of it hasn't." She hesitated. "I'm not supposed to say anything about what's in it. But I'll tell you that I've been doing this for six years, and I've never seen a file with this much in it for a birth parent who declined contact. Usually it's one letter. Maybe two."
Natalie took it to her car. She did not open it in the parking lot. She drove home, and Adam and Emma were not there yet—it was Emma's orchestra night—and she sat down at the kitchen table where she had told Adam everything and cut the rubber band with a pair of scissors.
There were nine letters. The first was dated two months after the visit in Baker, and the last was dated six years after that. They were all from Ruth, in blue ink, in a neat, slanted, teacherly hand. Most of them had photographs tucked inside: Claire at eighteen months on a blanket in a park; Claire at two, asleep in a laundry basket full of clean towels; Claire at three, in a tutu and rain boots, holding a frog with an expression of profound scientific seriousness.
The early letters were careful. Ruth said she understood. She said she was not angry. She said that Natalie should take all the time she needed, and that the door was open, and that she would keep writing so that when Natalie was ready, she would not have to start from nothing. She described Claire's first word (piano, or something close to it, pronounced pah-no, which Martin insisted counted) and her first steps (across the kitchen, toward the piano, naturally) and her first ear infection and her first terrible haircut, self-administered with Martin's desk scissors.
The middle letters were harder. In the fourth, Ruth wrote: Claire asked me today where she grew. I told her the truth, the way we always planned. She grew inside a young woman named Natalie, who loved her very much and couldn't take care of a baby, and who chose us. Claire wanted to know if you would come to her birthday. I told her I didn't know. I'm sorry to tell you this. I'm not trying to make you feel guilty. I just don't want to lie to her, and I don't want to lie to you either.