PART 15 – Carol Agreed to Speak With Me Again, but I Could Not Decide What Her Caution Meant

The next few days passed without anything new coming to light.

I continued checking the papers I had kept.

I looked through the same folder, the same envelopes, and the same loose sheets.

I found no document that explained the settlement.

I found no note that connected Wayne to it.

I found nothing that answered why my mother had left the letter with the tin.

The absence of new information was frustrating, but it was not proof of anything.

I reminded myself of that whenever I caught my thoughts moving too quickly.

Carol had agreed to speak with me again.

Until then, there was little use in inventing a conversation we had not yet had.

I kept the list of questions near the folder.

Every so often, I took it out and read it.

Some questions remained clear.

Others began to seem too broad.

I crossed out one that asked whether I had been misled.

I had no evidence that anyone had misled me.

The question assumed the very thing I needed to establish.

I replaced it with a simpler one.

What was explained to me before I accepted the settlement?

That question did not accuse anyone.

It asked for a history I could try to recover.

I felt better after writing it.

The difference was small, but important.

I could investigate what had happened without deciding in advance what it meant.

I also began to understand that my mother’s letter had affected me in two separate ways.

It had given me a reason to look into the settlement.

And it had made me reconsider how much I had trusted my own memory of that time.

Those were related matters, but they were not identical.

Even if the letter turned out to have a simple explanation, I would still need to understand the settlement better.

Even if the settlement proved to be exactly what I had always believed, I would still want to know why my mother had left me that message.

I could not make one answer do the work of both.

One evening, I took the letter out again.

I read it slowly, pausing at the places where my attention always seemed to return.

Wayne’s name remained there.

The name had not changed.

My knowledge had not changed either.

I had no new reason to believe it referred to anything specific.

I wondered whether Carol had reacted to the name itself or to the fact that it appeared in my mother’s letter.

That was another question for her.

I wrote it down, then set the pen aside.

I was beginning to see that a question did not have to be answered immediately to be worth asking.

For years, I had thought of uncertainty as a problem I needed to solve as quickly as possible.

Now I was trying to treat it as a condition I could tolerate while I gathered information.

That did not mean I enjoyed it.

It meant I no longer had to turn every unanswered question into a conclusion.

When Carol and I spoke again, I wanted to remember that.

I did not want to walk into the conversation expecting a confession.

I did not want to assume she was hiding something simply because she had asked me to wait.

And I did not want to dismiss my concerns just because I could not yet explain them.

I wanted the facts.

I wanted the context.

I wanted to understand what she had recognized when she read the letter.

Those were reasonable things to ask.

The rest would have to wait.

I put the letter back in the tin.

For a moment, I left the lid open.

I could see the paper resting inside, its edges slightly uneven from being handled.

I thought about how many times my mother might have looked at it before leaving it for me.

That thought was only a possibility.

I had no way to know whether she had reread it, whether she had written it long before, or whether she had made the decision at the last minute.

I closed the lid.

I did not want to turn an imagined scene into a memory of something that had never happened in front of me.

The tin made a small sound when the lid settled into place.

I kept my hand on it for a moment.

I missed my mother.

That feeling had been there from the beginning, but I had allowed the questions to crowd it out.

The letter had made me think about her choices, her silence, and the things she might have known.

It had also reminded me that she was gone and could not explain herself.

I could ask Carol for help.

I could look for records.

I could try to reconstruct the past.

But I could not ask my mother to clarify a sentence or tell me what she had intended.

I had to accept that part of the uncertainty might remain.

That was difficult, but it did not make the search pointless.

I could still learn what the documents showed.

I could still ask what Carol remembered.

I could still find out whether the settlement records existed and whether anyone could explain them.

I did not need a guaranteed ending before taking the next step.

When I checked my notes again, I noticed that I had written the same question in two different places.

Why had Carol stopped at Wayne’s name?

I crossed out the duplicate.

Then I put the remaining question near the top of the page.

I wanted to ask it plainly, without suggesting the answer.

I also wanted to ask whether my mother had ever discussed the settlement with Carol.

If Carol said no, I would have to accept that.

If she said yes, I would need to ask what she remembered.

Either way, I would have something more useful than speculation.

I placed the notes in the folder and slid the folder into the drawer.

The tin stayed on the table.

I was not hiding it.

I simply did not need to keep touching it to remind myself that it existed.

The next conversation would come when Carol and I had arranged it.

Until then, I could live with what I knew.

I could also admit what I did not.

For the first time in several days, those two things did not feel as if they were fighting each other.

Click here to continue reading: PART 16: I Stopped Trying to Guess the Missing Answers and Prepared to Hear Whatever Carol Could Honestly Tell Me