I nodded. I waited.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said, “except that I felt pulled toward her. Like there was something I recognized without knowing why. She doesn’t trust people easily, you could tell that right away. She had this quality of someone who has learned to be very careful.” His voice was steadying as he talked, the way talking sometimes has the effect of returning you to yourself. “We started talking slowly, over several visits. Little things at first. But eventually she told me about herself. She doesn’t have anyone, Mom. No family, no fixed address, no last name she’s sure of. She’s been moving from place to place since she was old enough to be on her own.”
He paused again. His eyes found mine.
“She told me the only thing she has ever had that connects her to where she came from is the locket. She has carried it her whole life. She said her adoptive parents, the family she went to as a baby, gave it back to her before they dropped her at the orphanage. She didn’t even know if it was hers originally, but it was the only thing she had, so she kept it.” He looked at me steadily. “After a few weeks, she showed me the photo. The woman in it looked like you, Mom. Like you when you were young. I thought maybe you’d know who she was. I thought maybe you could help her figure out where she came from.”
He said her name then. Elena. He said it the way you say the name of someone who matters to you, easily, without fanfare, the name already integrated into the ordinary vocabulary of his days.
I sat back in my chair. I closed my eyes. The lights in the room were the low overnight kind, gentle and amber, and for a moment I simply breathed, feeling the full weight of what the night had brought pressing down on all the years I had spent not thinking about it.
“Leo,” I said. My voice went unsteady before I could catch it. “There is something I should have told you a long time ago.”
