My daughter went missing in Egypt 20 years ago — Then one day, a postcard arrived that brought me to my knees
Tara sat inside the dusty old garage of the rented car with me as she began telling me how she truly believed that I simply left her alone in Egypt. She rummaged through one of the boxes before bringing out the collection of letters that she had sent to me every year on her birthday from the age of nine to the time that she turned eighteen. Letters that I had never even seen before in my life. And then she dropped a bomb.
It wasn’t some stranger who dragged her away from the garden. It was Claire, my husband’s best friend. On that very night when our daughter disappeared, Grant had gone straight over to Claire’s apartment and instead of taking Tara back to me, he stared into her eyes and told her that I left both of them.
Claire raised Tara under an entirely made-up identity. Just days before Claire died, the guilt overwhelmed her, and she confessed everything. Grant needed to escape his marriage, needed to run off with Claire, and Tara was part of his plan. The only problem is that he was far too much of a coward to take on the reputation of being the bad guy who abandoned his family in a foreign country.
“He chose himself,” Tara whispered.
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That night, Grant was in town, running an enormous promotional party for his new book, called The Daughter I Lost in Cairo. Tara had checked the advertisement on her cell phone.
“That book made him a lot of money,” she said.
I looked at her and replied, “Actually, Tara, he made his millions by hiding you.”
An hour later, we went directly to his book-signing event. He was standing up at the podium, speaking to the crowded room of people when he began reading an emotional excerpt concerning the profound grief associated with losing a child. In the middle of the reading, Tara got up and walked to the front of the aisle.
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