"I was in foster care from the time I can remember," I said. "Fourteen different placements before I was sixteen."
She flinched. Once, small, quickly gathered back.
I kept going.
I talked for nearly two hours.
She listened the way someone listens when they've been starving for information — not passively, not with polite attention, but with the specific intensity of a person receiving something they've been denied for a very long time. She asked questions that went directly to the right place. She said nothing when there was nothing useful to say.
When I got to the letters — the box, Nadia, the count — she went still.
"You have them," she said.
"Yes."
"I didn't know if they were arriving. Carol never responded. After a few years I stopped expecting them to get through. But I kept w
