Ramona

It took Faye's investigator eleven days to find her — a woman named Ramona Kessler, forty-eight years old, living three states away, who had spent two years of her childhood in Doreen's house before the placement ended and the record went quiet the way old foster records sometimes do.

Faye called me before I called Ramona, warned me to expect anything from a slammed phone to nothing at all. People bury two years like that under thirty more years of living. They don't always want them dug back up.

Ramona picked up on the second ring.

I explained who I was, carefully, the way Faye had coached me — not asking her to relive anything, just asking if she'd be willing to talk to an attorney, that's all, just talk.

There was a long silence. Long enough that I almost apologized and hung up.

"Doreen Pruitt," Ramona said finally, not a question, just the name laid flat on the table between us like she'd been carrying it a long time and was setting it down. "I wondered, sometimes, if anyone else ever went through that house. If it was just me, or if it kept happening after."

"It kept happening," I said. "I have a grandson. I have a recording."

Another silence, shorter this time.

"I was eight when I went there," she said. "Nine when I left. I don't — I'm not going to get into details on the phone with a stranger, I hope you understand that. But I'll tell you this much. I've been in therapy on and off for twenty years, and my therapist has a phrase for what that house was. She calls it a training ground. Not just for the kid getting hurt. For the kids watching, learning what love was supposed to look like."

I thought about Weston at six years old, learning the difference between the hook and the drawer.

"Would you be willing to talk to my attorney? Officially, I mean. For the case."

"I've spent thirty years being told I imagined my own childhood," Ramona said. "You're telling me there's a recording. Proof. Something that isn't just my word against a woman everyone else remembers as sweet."

"Yes."

"Then yes," she said. "I'll talk. God, yes. It's about time somebody believed me without me having to bleed for it first."

I hung up and sat with my phone in my lap, understanding for the first time just how much bigger this case had become while I wasn't looking — and how much more Doreen Pruitt had gotten away with than any of us had known.