Would You Like a Rose

Chapter 04 - Clara's Life

Clara had grown up in a row house in Pittsburgh, raised by a woman named Ruth Alcott who worked as a hospital administrator and her husband Frank, who taught high school chemistry and coached the swim team on weekends.

They were good people. Clara was careful, always, to say that first, the way a person says something that matters most at the beginning of a complicated account because they're afraid of where the account will go and don't want the most important thing to get lost in the complications.

Ruth and Frank were good people who had adopted a newborn infant through a private agency in 1975 with a considerable amount of money changing hands in a direction they'd been told was simply the standard process fee, and who had loved that infant with complete, genuine, uncomplicated devotion for the rest of their lives.

Clara had found the adoption records accidentally, the summer after Ruth died, while clearing the house that she and Frank had shared for fifty-one years. The documents were in a fireproof box in the back of the master bedroom closet, beneath a folder of insurance papers and a rolled-up copy of Frank and Ruth's original marriage certificate.

Clara had sat on the floor of that bedroom for two hours, reading.

She'd brought this account to Victoria at their second meeting, which had happened the following afternoon, in Victoria's library, at Victoria's somewhat formal request conveyed through Lily, who had materialized at Victoria's building's service entrance at nine the following morning as though she'd been precisely deployed there, which she had.

"The adoption records listed the agency's name," Clara told her, sitting in one of the library's leather chairs, holding the cup of tea a staff member had brought without being asked. "I spent two years trying to trace the agency backward. It had closed. The records it had maintained were sealed under a different legal framework than current adoption records, which meant accessing them required either a court order or someone with direct access to the original contracting parties."

"Which were my family," Victoria said.

"Which were your family," Clara confirmed. "Which, at that point, I knew nothing about. I had a name. Rosewood. The original adoption contract listed only a maternal family name, no first names, no address. I had a photograph of the ring."

"Where did you get the photograph."

"Ruth kept it," Clara said. "A single Polaroid photograph, taken of the ring before it was given up with the infant. I think, honestly, she kept it as some kind of proof. She was a careful woman. She kept records of things that mattered."

Victoria absorbed this. "The ring was given with you."

"That's what the contract indicated," Clara said. "A family heirloom to accompany the child, with a notation that the engraving inside identified the family name. I think whoever arranged the adoption wanted to leave a door open. Some mechanism of eventual recognition, if anyone ever thought to look through it."

"Or a mechanism of proof," Victoria said. "In case the arrangement was ever contested legally."

Clara looked at her. "I hadn't thought of it that way."

"I'm thinking about it that way because James Ellery, my attorney, called this morning with information that suggests the original adoption arrangement may have been legally irregular," Victoria said. "Specifically, your adoption was registered through an agency that also handled several other private placements during the same period, all involving families from New York's upper class, all involving considerable payments, and all involving adoption records that were sealed under terms substantially more restrictive than standard procedure."

"Someone was paid to make this disappear," Clara said.

"Multiple someones," Victoria confirmed. "Over multiple years. James believes the original arrangement goes back to my grandmother, Catherine Rosewood, and that it was maintained and renewed by my mother, Eleanor, at least once during her lifetime. Probably more than once."

Clara sat with that, setting her teacup down carefully, her composure holding in a way that told Victoria this particular revelation, as shocking as it was, was one she'd been preparing herself for across several years of research.

"Lily's father," Victoria said, the question she'd been holding since the park. "Where is he."

Clara's composure shifted, the specific, contained shift of someone navigating a grief they've learned to carry efficiently rather than allowing it to overwhelm them at inconvenient moments.

"Daniel died two years ago," she said. "Heart attack. He was forty-four." She paused. "He was the one who encouraged me to keep looking. He believed, longer than I did honestly, that I'd eventually find enough to actually approach your family directly."

Victoria looked at the library window for a moment, at the afternoon sky going gold above the park.

"Lily's been selling roses to fund this," she said quietly.

"Lily's been selling roses because she's nine and she wanted to feel like she was doing something," Clara said, with the specific, almost apologetic warmth of a mother explaining her child's logic. "She chose the restaurant because she'd seen a photograph of you attending an event there. She chose the roses because she thought they'd give her a reason to approach tables. She thought of the ring as the proof."

Victoria looked at her sister.