During the school trip, she intended to leave the campground, catch a bus from a nearby town, and meet them.
“She said she only wanted answers,” Kendra explained. “She said she’d come back the next day.”
“And you believed her?” “We were fifteen.”
That answer hurt because there was nothing smart or malicious about it.
Just two kids making a terrible choice and thinking they could control everything that followed.
“What happened when she got there?”
Kendra paused.
“She told them you were dead.”
I stared at her.
“She told them what?”
“She was angry. She said you had died several months earlier and that she discovered the adoption documents while going through your things.”
I felt physically ill.
“My daughter told strangers I was dead?”
“They weren’t strangers to her anymore.”
“Where is she?”
Kendra took out her own phone and showed me a message Mallory had sent that night.
