Karen Palmer

We used our forged documents, and we went to two different DMVs so they wouldn't connect us together.

And, you know, we made up some baloney about being New Yorkers who'd never had to drive.

Uh, yes.

We used them to open a bank account.

I had a regular sort of phone date with her, where I would call her from a phone booth at the supermarket.

My mother's mobile home was broken into.

The whole place had been turned over, and nothing was taken except her address book.

We'll be right back.

At the time that we left, they had given me sole custody because of the kidnapping, but with the caveat that he can petition the court and try to get his parental rights restored and normal visitation and all the things that divorced families deal with.

And as far as I know, he never did any of it.

I think he...

He knew what he was in for, and we were so bonded to each other.

It's like we had a version of a wartime romance, you know, where like the bombs were going off all around us.

And so we felt so connected to each other and so connected to the girls and so devoted to the idea of making a safe place for all of us.

that he has never for even one second expressed any resentment, any anger, any regret.

He has felt that we did what we had to do.

By this point, it had been 20 years, and there is not a day in which I did not think about him.

And filled with apprehension that maybe he will find us after all.

But I was trying to get myself out of the habit of checking, because it had been so long, and I thought, you know, I can't live like this.

And when he opened the present, you know, he was kind of looking at it, and he and I were initially kind of baffled in our, you know, dense parental unit ways.