I’d seen the name on documents years earlier.

“Yes,” I said.

Mr. Harris closed his eyes.

When he opened them, they were wet.

“Isabella was my sister.”

Sophie stared at him.

I thought I’d misheard.

“What?”

“My older sister.”

He pointed toward the clipping.

“That’s my sister.”

Mrs. Parker slowly sat down.

Mr. Harris was focused entirely on Sophie.

“She left home when I was 16. I knew she got married. Years later, my father told me she’d had a baby girl.”

His voice broke.

“A girl named Sophie.”

I couldn’t speak.

Sophie could.

“Me?”

Mr. Harris nodded.

“You.”

She stared at him.

“Then what are you?”

The innocence of the question seemed to break something in him.

“I’m your uncle.”

Sophie looked at me, then back at him.

“My real uncle?”

“Your biological uncle,” I said carefully.

Then he immediately looked at me.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“No.” I squeezed Sophie’s hand. “Uncle is fine.”

Mr. Harris sat on the floor, no longer seeming to care that he was the principal.

“I’ve wondered where you were for seven years.”

That hit me harder than anything else.

“Wait.”

I looked at the clipping.

The half-visible face.

The name Harris.

And suddenly, I remembered something from years earlier.

A gray-haired man standing on our porch with a cardboard box.

“Oh, my God.”

Mr. Harris looked at me.

“Richard.”

“What?”

“I met your father.”

He stood so quickly the chair behind him scraped the floor.

“When?”

“When Sophie was a baby.”

The memory returned clearly.

My husband and I had only recently learned Sophie would be staying with us permanently.

Richard had called first and asked if he could bring a box containing things that had belonged to Isabella and Sophie’s father.

He stayed maybe twenty minutes.

He looked exhausted.

Before leaving, he rested one hand on the box.

“Give these to her when she’s old enough to ask,” he’d said.

Then he looked at baby Sophie sleeping in my husband’s arms.

“Just don’t let her grow up thinking they didn’t love her.”