Part 6
“The result came back. My name is Kate.”
Elaine was quiet for a moment. When she answered, she did not stumble over the name.
“Kate,” she said. “Are you alone?”
“Yes. Peter can come on the line if he’s there.”
There was a rustle, then Peter’s voice. “Hello, Kate.”
She told them what the report said. Elaine cried softly, far enough from the phone that Kate heard mostly the effort to contain it. Peter waited until she could speak, and neither asked when they could bring Kate home.
“Would you be willing to meet us?” Peter asked.
Kate chose a quiet hotel café outside Greer, a place connected to none of their memories. They met there on a Tuesday morning. Kate arrived first and took the chair with a view of the entrance.
Elaine carried no album. Peter brought no box of saved toys, no dress, no document that required Kate to become a child in front of them. They sat across from her with empty hands on the table.
“What would you like to know?” Elaine asked.
Kate had made a list and left it upstairs at the bakery. “What did you do after the crash?”
Peter told her about searching hospitals, shelters, roadside churches, and truck stops until the search shifted from days to years. He stopped when his voice began to fray. Elaine did not finish for him.
“I don’t remember you,” Kate said.
Elaine pressed her thumb against the edge of her napkin. “I know.”
“I may never remember.”
“Then we’ll know you from here, if you let us.”
Kate could not promise what that would mean. She told them about Upstate Table, Rosa’s bakery, and the apartment where the pipes clicked before dawn. Peter asked whether the buses in Greenville really ran as badly as the reports said, and Kate found herself explaining three routes on the sugar packet between them.
After forty-five minutes, she put her cup on its saucer. Both Carvers stood when she did, but neither reached for her.
“Goodbye, Kate,” Peter said.
Elaine repeated it. Kate crossed the lot without anyone following her.
She told Walter two days later. He was at his kitchen table sorting old cooperative route cards into piles Nathan had labeled KEEP, SCAN, and ASK DAD. One card sat by itself between KEEP and ASK DAD.
Walter read the laboratory’s first line, then looked at the brass disk resting against Kate’s shirt. His eyes filled, but his voice stayed level as he remembered pieces of the wreck in no useful order: rain coming sideways through broken glass, Nathan shouting from somewhere behind him, the child in the blue jacket crawling toward the shoulder. The driver had later told him that Lucy refused to climb fully into the cab until he repeated the mile marker back to her.
“The driver said you were terrified,” Walter said. “You did it anyway.”
Kate waited for recognition to rise in her. Nothing did. The scene remained Walter’s memory, vivid in him and dark in her.
“I’m sorry I don’t remember,” she said.
“I’m sorry you had to.” Walter looked at the route cards and frowned. “Did we have lunch?”
They had eaten twenty minutes earlier. Kate moved the ASK DAD pile aside and cut the remaining sandwich in half.
“We can have some more,” she said.
Through her attorney, Kate authorized the laboratory report and reconstructed records to be sent to the investigator who still held Lucy’s file. After its own review, the office closed the missing-child case. Kate’s legal name did not change.
Over the next five months, Kate met Elaine and Peter for breakfast twice a month, usually for an hour unless she chose to leave sooner. They asked about her week before offering anything about Lucy. Elaine kept the albums at home; Peter once brought a list of relatives, saw Kate’s face, and returned it to his pocket unopened.
Some Sundays were easy. One ended after twenty minutes when a truck braked hard outside and the sound turned Kate’s hands cold. No lost scene returned; rain still woke her, and the dispatch disk still held a history she understood but could not remember. The Carvers remained people she was learning. They called her Kate every time.
Nathan kept the distance she had required. He did not appear at the bakery, send news through Walter, or turn project questions into personal ones. When Kate needed Blue Ridge figures for work, someone else delivered them.
She saw him at Walter’s care-plan meeting in October because Walter asked her to come. Before the separation, Nathan would have arrived with a schedule already printed. This time he placed a blank sheet on the table.
“Dad wants to keep taking the bus to the mill market,” Nathan said. “I’m worried about him going alone. Dad, what kind of help would make that trip work?”
Walter considered this with the seriousness he once gave a late truck. “Company. Not a guard.”
“Who do you want with you?”
“You, sometimes. Kate, if she wants. I carry my own wallet.”
Nathan wrote that down. They agreed on an accompanied trip, one small bag of fruit, the wallet in Walter’s zippered inside pocket, and no detours without telling the person with him. When Walter rejected a location tracker, Nathan asked whether he would keep carrying his emergency card in that pocket instead. Walter agreed.
Three weeks later, Kate invited Nathan to coffee in the bakery after closing. Rosa left the worktable lights on and went upstairs to check a leaking faucet, giving them privacy without pretending not to worry.
“You asked him what he wanted,” Kate said.
“I’m trying to do that before I decide what he needs.”
“That isn’t the only thing between us.”
“I know.”
Kate turned her cup by its handle. “I told you not to search, and you promised. But I kept thinking that if we were good enough—if enough time passed—you’d stop looking. Then I wouldn’t have to decide.”
Nathan looked at her without reaching across the table. “That doesn’t make what I did smaller.”
“No.”
They had once exchanged keys because it seemed less frightening than talking about where the relationship was going. Now neither had a key to offer, and Kate was not ready to ask for one.
“Breakfast Sunday,” she said. “Just breakfast. After that, we’ll see.”
Nathan nodded. “All right.”
On Sunday, they ate eggs and toast in a booth near the bus station. Nathan arrived without flowers or a speech. When breakfast ended, Kate did not set the next date, and he did not ask her to.
The mill market trip came the following Saturday. Walter wore his blue cooperative cap and checked twice that his wallet was in the pocket they had agreed on. At the peach stall, he chose four peaches, rejected six, and carried the small paper bag himself.
At the bus stop, the wind lifted one corner of the bag. Nathan reached toward it, then stopped.
“How do you want help?” he asked Walter.
“Hold the bottom while I get on. Then give it back.”
Nathan did exactly that.
Walter took a priority seat with the peaches settled between his shoes. Kate sat across the aisle by the window. Nathan remained standing after the bus pulled away, one hand on the rail, leaving her the space she had asked for months ago.
At the next light, Kate lifted her tote from the empty seat beside her and set it on her lap.
“There’s room,” she said.
Nathan sat down. The bus turned from the mill toward downtown, and the brass Route 17 disk tapped lightly against Kate’s zipper while Walter counted his peaches under his breath.