He turned back to me. “Have you seen her?”

“I just saw her in a yearbook photo. She’s my daughter.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Have you seen her recently?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

He ran a hand through his hair and unlocked the screen door. “Ellie ran away three days ago.”

FORTY-THREE

Alex and Valerie Corzine sat on their sofa, nervous, anxious, and not very happy. Lauren and I sat across from them on an old, floral-patterned loveseat. The little girl had been dismissed to her room.

Alex looked at his wife nervously one more time, then at me. “You’re her father?”

“I am. This is her mother.”

“I need some assurances from you.”

Anger flashed in my gut. “Right now, I’m not assuring you of anything.”

“You get angry about anything I’m about to tell you, we can go outside and you can take it out on me,” he said. “But not on my wife, and not in front of our other daughter.”

“Elizabeth isn’t your daughter.”

Lauren rested her hand on my knee.

He licked his lips, took a deep breath. “Take it out on me. Not on Val and not in front of Teresa.”

I looked at Valerie. Her hands were in her lap, clasped so tightly together that her knuckles were the color of enamel.

I looked back to Alex. “Alright. On you. Not your wife. Not in front of your daughter.”

He studied me for a moment, then nodded. “We adopted Ellie eight years ago. Through very private channels.”

“Illegally,” Lauren said.

He nodded. “Yes. At the time, we thought we were unable to have children. We were years away on the public adoption lists. No guarantees of anything ever. So we explored other options.”

I pictured Elizabeth standing in the front yard with the Christmas lights. Like it was the day before and a hundred years before, all at the same time.

“We found a woman on the Internet, offering private adoptions,” he continued. “For…a large sum. At first, it seemed out of reach. But we were desperate.” He glanced at his wife and she nodded, staring at her hands. “So, we agreed to meet with her.”

“Where did you meet?” I asked, glancing around the room, looking for pictures of Elizabeth. But there was only generic art on the walls.

“Phoenix,” Alex said. “We flew in on a Sunday afternoon, met with her that night. She told us that a girl was available. Orphaned. Parents died in a home explosion. Only child. About seven years old.”

I was chewing on the inside of my cheek, my teeth grinding into my flesh as I listened. Lauren’s fingernails dug into my leg.

“We asked for more info and she said that was all she could tell us and that was all we could discuss with her,” Alex said. “There was no extended family and she’d be turned over to DCFS within forty-eight hours if we didn’t want her.”

Lauren cleared her throat. “This woman say where she was coming from?”

“No. We asked and she wouldn’t tell us. We had to decide that night and let her know the next morning.”

“So, you said yes,” I said.

Alex let out a long breath. “We went back to our hotel and Val and I talked about it. The cost was our entire life savings and then some. We pulled money from retirement funds and borrowed against our home.”

“How much?”

He hesitated.

“How much?” I asked again, my voice tight.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” he said.

I looked away from him. He’d bought my daughter for the price of a house.

“So, we talked it over and decided to do it,” he said, rubbing at his chin. “We wanted a child badly and it sounded like she needed a family.”

“She didn’t,” I said. “She had one.”

He swallowed. “We didn’t know that.”

“But you blindly accepted that some seven-year old girl could be bought for a hundred grand, outside of the normal legal process,” I said, not bothering to hide my disgust.

“We were desperate,” Valerie whispered.

“As desperate as we’ve been to find her?” I asked. “I doubt that very much.”

Quiet settled over the room for a moment.

“Yes, we probably knew that it wasn’t the…smartest thing to do,” Alex finally said. “But we did believe that this girl was coming to us with nowhere else to go.”

I believed that that’s what they wanted to believe. But it didn’t make it alright.

“I called the woman, told her yes,” Alex continued. “She told us we needed to wait in Phoenix for forty-eight hours and then she’d be there. We made arrangements to stay two more nights and then she was brought to us.”

A thousand questions were running through my brain. What was she like? How did she feel? What did she say? But I kept my mouth closed and let him continue.

“She was quiet, very withdrawn,” Alex said. “Which we were prepared for. Again, we thought she’d just lost her parents and we were told it would be best not to bring it up. So, we didn’t. And we didn’t force ourselves on her.”

“Who was the woman?” I asked, trying to keep my composure and not picture how Elizabeth felt at that moment. “The woman who brought her to you and took your money?”

They exchanged nervous looks, hesitancy riddling their body language.

“I’m telling you right now, all of this is coming out one way or another,” I said. “You don’t wanna tell us now? That’s fine. But you’re going to be talking to other people and they are going to ask the same question and you won’t have the choice of not answering.”

Alex leaned back in the couch and folded his arms across his chest. “Her name was Marianna Gelson. But we’ve never spoken to her again.”

Probably not even her real name, if she was what I thought she was.

“So, she was quiet and withdrawn,” Alex said. “For quite some time, but eventually, she started to come around. We purposely avoided talking about her past and, given what we were told, we didn’t think she’d want to talk about it.”

I felt my blood pressure rise and I was having a difficult time maintaining any semblance of civility. I didn’t know what was going through Lauren’s mind, but it was all I could do to not jump across the room and attack him.

“We kept her home for a couple of years,” he said. “Val homeschooled her. She really seemed to like it and…”

“You know what?” I said, cutting him off. “I could give a shit about what she seemed to like and what she didn’t. I could give a shit about how you felt or homeschooling or anything else you did with my daughter. What I want to know is where she is so I can see her.”

Lauren’s hand pressed down on my thigh like she was trying to keep me seated.

Valerie started crying silently, tears streaming down her face. Alex put his arm around her. I wanted to punch them both in the face.

“As she’s gotten older, she’s asked us a few more questions,” he said, his voice less steady. “About her adoption. We were…careful.”

“Meaning you lied,” I said.

“Meaning we told her what we knew.”

“So, you told her that you bought her for a hundred thousand bucks? Did she ask to see the price tag that was on her toe?”

He shifted, uncomfortable. “No. Of course not. We were vague about the adoption details. We told her it was through an agency and that there was little information due to the circumstances.” He glanced at his wife. “That’s what we were told to do.”

I wanted to be able to put myself in his position, to understand where he was coming from, to have some sort of sympathy. But I couldn’t. All I could see was the guy who’d taken my place.

“And she was satisfied with that?” Lauren asked. “She just accepted vague details?”

“At first, I guess,” Alex said. “And there weren’t many more questions. But then recently, she pressed some more. She wanted more answers. More clarification.”

“And?” Lauren said.

He cleared his throat. “We shared some things, but not others. But…I think she sensed that. That we were leaving some things out.”