My son drove me to the address on the little brass key the very next morning, a tidy house in Wilkes-Barre, twenty minutes away.
A woman in her forties opened the door, and I knew her eyes the second I saw them. They were Franks eyes. They were my eyes.
Frank had told the truth in his letter. In 1979, I had given birth to a baby girl, and I was very ill, and they told me she had died. Frank, twenty-six and terrified, had signed papers my own mother pressed on him, papers that placed our living daughter for adoption, because my mother believed a sick young couple could not raise her. Frank carried that lie for forty-six years, and he spent them quietly finding her, watching from a distance, keeping a photograph in a box he could not bring himself to open with me.
The daughter I was told to bury in 1979 had been alive her whole life, and my husband had finally led me to her door.
Her name is Catherine. She had been raised by good people, and she had wondered her whole life about the woman in the one photo her adoptive parents kept. When I told her who I was, she put her hand over her mouth, and then she held on to me like she would never let go.
I have two sons and now a daughter, and three grandchildren I never knew. I do not have Frank anymore, and I had to make my peace with what he hid. But he spent his last years making sure that when he was gone, I would not be alone, and that the little girl in the red coat would finally come home.