The choice to marry at all, under these circumstances, was itself a significant choice. It brought her into intimate proximity with people who would inevitably want to know her past, who would expect access to the social and family context that is normally shared between spouses. Whatever calculation led her to marry Blake Ruff — and the calculation was presumably some combination of genuine feeling and perhaps a belief that she could manage the questions that would arise — it was a calculation that created pressures she had not experienced as a solitary individual and that eventually became unsustainable.
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## The Sealed Letter and the Daughter Who Was Eighteen
Among the two letters found in the car on Christmas Eve 2010 was one addressed to Lori’s daughter, with a request or instruction that it be opened when the daughter turned eighteen. The eleven-page letter to Blake was read by the family and described by law enforcement, but the letter to the daughter — its existence, its character, what it contained — is a matter of some privacy.
Published accounts confirm that the letter did not reveal Lori’s real identity. Whatever she had chosen to tell her daughter, it was not the name Kimberly McLean or any of the information that would have allowed investigators to make the connection that eventually took six years of work to establish.
The daughter was two years old when her mother died. The letter was addressed to a version of her daughter that did not yet exist — an eighteen-year-old young woman who would read words written by a mother she could not remember. What those words said, and what the now-older daughter has done with them, is not part of the public record and is appropriately private.