26THE HOLIDAYS HAD taken over Katherine’s life, but in between buying gifts and planning the Noche Buena, she was also thinking of the summer of next year, five months away. She had to assure Dennis she was not obsessing; there would be a time to think about the family trip to Culion and accomplish her own research on Teresa during that trip. After the visit with Nora’s family—and her dream, however absurd—Katherine had decided that if she could no longer continue with the story of Mercedes’s disappearance and death, then she would try to find out more about Mercedes’s mother.
After her meeting about a new book project on children’s rights at the office of Protect the Children International this afternoon, Katherine decided to visit the Foundation for Culion Development, which also had it
