A note scrawled in the margins caught her attention: Unclaimed by adoptive family—placed in child’s keepsake box. Her breath caught. The necklace had stayed with him. The possibility was no longer abstract—it was real. She asked if there was any way to learn where that box had gone.
Rules, forms, and confidentiality clauses rose like walls, but Mara pushed. Eventually, a sympathetic caseworker hinted that the keepsake box had been delivered to the boy’s adoptive parents upon his high school graduation. That meant, if she could find them, she could find the necklace and tell him of all that awaited him.