What they could not know, and what the locked box would reveal after her death, was that the life they had shared with her rested on a foundation she had constructed from documents that did not belong to her.
—
## A Name at the End
The resolution of the Lori Ruff case produced a name. It produced, beyond the name, some context — a family, a childhood, a moment of departure. It produced, for the Ruff family, an explanation for at least some of what had been inexplicable: the absolute refusal to discuss the past, the lack of family connections, the care taken to prevent any inquiry that might have revealed the foundation on which Lori Ruff’s identity rested.
It produced, for Kimberly McLean’s birth family, a different kind of closure. They had not known for thirty years what had happened to a daughter and a sister who had told them not to look for her. The answer they received in 2016 was not the one any of them would have chosen: she was dead, had been dead for six years, had spent her adult life under names they had never heard. The relationship they had with her was a relationship that had ended at eighteen and had not resumed in any form they knew about.
The daughter has a grandmother. The grandmother knows she has a granddaughter. The knowledge came too late to change what happened between them in the years when that knowledge might have mattered more.
What the case does not provide is an explanation for the choices at its center. The reasons Kimberly McLean left Pennsylvania in 1986, the reasons she chose to construct a new identity as thoroughly as she did, the reasons she kept the documents in a locked box while warning her husband away from it — these remain in the category of what is not known and cannot be known.