AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You could be doing this for a long time. Don’t you have other things you could be doing with your time? You seem like a talented girl. You’re doing this radio thing.”
“Podcast.”
“Right, whatever you call it. Why don’t you do a different one and move on? Are you a writer or something?”
“I don’t want to move on. I want to find her. I’m going to keep talking to people who knew her until I do.”
“It seems like a lot of work to track down someone who isn’t trying to track you down.”
“It is, but how do I know she hasn’t tried to find me? My adoption was closed. She wouldn’t know my name or my adoptive parents. I’ve considered all these things, Ethan.”
“I admire your guts, darlin’. You’ve got to have ‘em to keep doing something like this.”
“Thank you. Is there anything you’d like to add before we finish?”
?
?I think Penny was a good girl back then. I just want you to know that whether you ever find her or not. If she gave you up, it was for a good reason. It had to be.”
“I appreciate that. Thanks for sitting down and answering my questions, Ethan.”
The recording ended and my eyes lifted to AJ’s.
“What happened after that?” he asked.
“I gave Ethan my number and told him to text me if he remembered anything or heard from anyone in their class that might know something about her. Then I left. That was it.”
“There is no more of the recording?”
“No. That was it. You heard the entire thing from start to finish.”
AJ looked frustrated. “But you didn’t ask him why it was a tough time for him. Why he didn’t like going back to those memories from college.”
I huffed. “He said it wasn’t related to my mom so I moved on. It wasn’t the Ethan Howard interrogation show. That’s not how this works. It’s about Penny Neworth. It’s a show about my journey to find her. Not about his college heartbreak or hangovers or whatever drama a twenty-two-year old guy had in 1990.”
“Sorry. It just seems like a missed opportunity there. I wish there was more.”
“I do too. I’m sorry. That’s all I have from Ethan.” It seemed obvious when we played the conversation back that I should have pushed for more, but at the time it was a free flowing discussion, going from one topic to another. There was barely enough time to think on the fly. I was still honing my skills as an interviewer.
“Until he texted you Monday morning?”
I nodded. “Right. I left Saturday evening and there were no more communications from him until Monday morning.”
“Can I see the text he sent?” he requested.
I held up my phone and scrolled through the text messages until I landed on the one from Ethan. I was relieved that it hadn’t evaporated like the emails had.
I passed my phone to AJ. “Here it is, the entire thing.”
I waited while he read it.
“Shit, Syd.”
I tried to interpret his worry. “What? What is it?”
“There’s no way this text came from Ethan Howard.”
Chapter Seventeen
