But the outline is this. They had not abandoned her. They had not made a choice to leave her where she was found. Something had happened, in the complicated and sometimes dangerous territory of circumstances beyond a young family’s control, and she had been taken from them when she was very small.
They had spent years looking. They had not stopped. They had lived inside the particular sustained grief of parents who do not know what happened to their child and cannot stop hoping that somewhere, somehow, the child is safe and might one day be found.
They had held onto that hope for two decades.
And then a woman named Desiree had called them.
The Afternoon She Understood What the Necklace Had Always Been
That afternoon, Cara followed her parents to a home she had never seen.
She stood in rooms that were connected to her by blood and history and the long thread of a story that had been running parallel to her own life without her knowing it existed.
She held the necklace.
She thought about her grandmother, Merinda, who had found a baby in a terrible situation and had brought her home and loved her without reservation for the rest of her life. Who had wrapped that necklace in a scarf and kept it safe and placed it eventually in Cara’s hands, knowing in some way that it mattered beyond its appearance.
Who had perhaps known, in the quiet space of what she never said aloud, that the necklace was not just an heirloom.
It was a path.
