The attorney, a woman named Ruth with a calm voice and no patience for mythmaking, told them Natalie's go-bag documents would have supported a strong filing had Natalie lived. As for Greg, there was little criminal avenue without Natalie's testimony, but there was the matter of her estate and the narrative Greg still controlled in certain circles. Ruth advised delivering the parents' letter with a witness present, documenting everything, and not engaging Greg directly. Regarding Mara, Ruth said carefully, You are not legally required to do anything. You may be morally wandering in a place without trail markers. Proceed with consent and without urgency masquerading as virtue.
Elise liked Ruth immediately.
Drafting the message to Mara took four evenings. They argued about tone, about how much grief to include, about whether to mention Greg at all — they decided not to. They sent it through the agency channel Natalie had used, along with a summary of relevant medical history Natalie had kept in the manila envelope: the aneurysm, the thyroid, a grandmother's breast cancer, a cousin's Type 1 diabetes. They offered a single email address created for the purpose. Then they waited.
Waiting, Elise discovered, was its own marriage test. Daniel checked the inbox too often. Elise told him to stop. Daniel stopped, then dreamed of phones ringing. Toby brought home a school project about family trees and asked where Aunt Natalie went on the tree if she was in heaven. Elise drew a tree on butcher paper that included Natalie with a star beside her name and left a faint pencil dotted line into the unknown, which she did not explain. Some truths waited for older years.
Three weeks after the cabin, Greg called Daniel. Daniel put it on speaker at Elise's request. Greg's voice was silk over wire. He had heard, he said, that Daniel was spreading stories. He suggested Daniel remember who had held Natalie's hand at the end. Daniel said, You were at a conference in Phoenix when she collapsed in Vail. The silence on the line was gratifying and ugly. Elise wrote on a notepad: end the call. Daniel ended the call. They documented the time. They forwarded the note to Ruth. That night Elise dreamed she was packing a coral bag of her own and woke reaching for Daniel's shoulder, then stopped, then reached anyway. He held still and let her decide the pressure of the touch.
"I hate that he gets to live without her consequences," Elise whispered.
"I know," Daniel said. "Me too."
Two months after the cabin — a gray December afternoon, Toby at a friend's house — an email arrived from Mara Lang in Portland. Elise read it standing up. Daniel read it over her shoulder. Mara's tone was cautious, intelligent, not hungry for drama. She had wondered, when Natalie's emails stopped, whether she had changed her mind. She had searched online months later and found an obituary. She had cried in a grocery parking lot. She had not known how to reach anyone without making trouble. She had a son named Eli, four years old. She wanted the medical history — thank you — and she wanted, if it was not too much, to know what Natalie had been like when she laughed. She did not ask for money. She did not ask to be adopted into their holidays. She asked if they had any photographs Natalie would have been okay sharing.