Part 1
For twenty years, I believed my daughter had vanished from a garden in Cairo. One day, I received a postcard from Egypt with an address just three miles from my home in Ohio. I thought it would be another cruel reminder of the past, but what I found there revealed that someone I once trusted had kept the truth from me all this time.
The postcard had a Cairo stamp, but the address on the back was close. There was no message, no signature, just a sentence written in small capital letters: “Come only if you still want to know the truth about Tara.”
My daughter had disappeared in Cairo when she was eight years old. Now, twenty years later, I was driving toward a row of rental garages with that postcard on the passenger seat and my heart pounding. I found apartment 42, lifted the cold metal door, and braced myself for the worst. Instead, I fell to my knees.
There was a woman sitting on a folding chair next to three cardboard boxes. She had my eyes. She looked at me as if she’d spent her whole life deciding whether to hate me or not.
“You got here fast, Cassidy,” she said.
I could barely breathe. “Tara?”
Her lips trembled, but she didn’t move. “I needed to know if you were coming.”
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