She put the kettle on and then she cleared her kitchen table and started laying things out the way you would lay out evidence, because that is exactly what it was.
The birth certificate with Teresa's name on it.
The placement agreement with Frank's handwriting on it.
A photocopy of her adoptive mother's will.
And then, from the bottom of a shoebox, she pulled out a sealed envelope.
It was yellowed at the corners and it had my sister-in-law's handwriting on the front, just the name Emma, in the same rounded letters Teresa used to put on our Christmas cards.
Emma said, "I've had this for two years.
I never opened it.
I was afraid it would say she didn't want me."
I asked her if she wanted me to do it, and she nodded, and I slid my finger under the flap and opened it.
The note inside was dated three weeks before Teresa died.
She wrote that when she told Frank who the father was, Frank told her it would never touch the family, and that the child would be placed with good people and raised right, and that Teresa was not to see her and not to look for her and not to speak of her again.
She wrote that she had agreed because she was nineteen and she was scared and her mother had just died.
She wrote that she had named the father to Frank, and that Frank knew, and that if anything ever happened to her, Emma should be told the truth, and Emma should be given what was hers.
Then she wrote, "I am sorry I did not get to raise you.
I thought about you every day of my life.
Your mother, Teresa."
Emma read it through once, standing up.
Then she read it through again, sitting down.
Then she slid off her chair onto the kitchen floor and sat there with her back against the cabinets and her arms around her knees, and I sat down on the floor next to her and we stayed like that for a while, neither of us talking.
The kettle went off and neither of us got up.
After a while she said, "So she did want me."
And I said, "She did."
Later, when she was ready, I took out my phone and photographed the note on the table, every word of it, and sent it to Peter Vaughn.
I sent him the envelope too, with the handwriting on the front.
It was maybe a quarter to ten when I sent it.
At 10:41 he replied, and it was three words.
"We can win."
I showed Emma the screen and she read it and laughed, which was the first time I had heard her laugh, and then she started crying, and then so did I, two women sitting on a kitchen floor in Yonkers holding onto a letter that had been waiting eight years to be read.
I did not go home that night.
I slept on her couch, and in the morning I called Daniel from her kitchen and told him where I was, and he said, "Claire, come home, we can talk about this."
I said, "Daniel, I found your sister's letter, and I am not going to be talked out of anything anymore," and I hung up, and I made coffee for Emma, and we started writing down everything we knew in a notebook because Peter had told me we needed a timeline.
That notebook is what I brought to court.
The hearing was set for nine-thirty in the morning at the surrogate's court on Chambers Street, and I got there at eight-forty because I could not sit in the apartment any longer.
The hallway smelled like floor wax and old radiators, and Emma was already there, sitting on a bench with her hands folded over a manila folder, wearing the same gray coat she had worn the first day she walked into the Delgado & Sons conference room.
I sat down next to her and neither of us said much.
She asked me if I had slept and I said no, and she said she hadn't either, and then we just waited for the doors to open.
Peter Vaughn arrived at nine-fifteen with a rolling case and a binder thick enough to hold a phone book, and he sat down beside us and went through what was going to happen, step by step, the way he had gone through it with me on the phone the night before.