He told Nora about it that night, at her kitchen table, over takeout pad thai that neither of them was eating.
"Forty-eight thousand," he said. "She took it out of her retirement in April. A loan against her 401(k). Paid it into an account at some bank in Midtown I never heard of. And there was a folder." He turned his fork over and over. "Listings. Duplexes. A fourplex on Q Street. Spreadsheets, rents, renovation budgets. She'd done the design boards. Paint colors, tile, all of it. They were good." He said this with a kind of helpless wonder. "Honey, they were really good. I didn't know she could still do that."
Nora watched him. Her father had big, square hands, scarred white across the knuckles from thirty years of engines and lathes and the occasional teenager who didn't respect a drill press. He was turning the fork in them like a tool he didn't recognize.
"She was going to leave," Frank said. "That's what it was. Not just—him. She was going to take the money from your house and buy some buildings with him and fix them up and have a whole life. A business. Her own thing." He set the fork down. "And she couldn't ask me for it. I would've—I don't know what I would've said. I think I would've said, what do you need that for, Diane. I think that's what I would've said." He was quiet. "Thirty-two years and I never once asked her what she wanted. I thought if she wanted something she'd tell me."
"Dad. Don't. Don't make this your fault."
"I'm not. It's not." He rubbed his face with both hands. "It's not my fault. But I was there. I was right there in the garage for all of it, building a damn boat."
* * *
The certified letter came back on a Friday, eleven days after the shower, but it didn't come in the mail.
Her mother brought it.
Nora was on the couch with her feet up, grading nothing—she'd started her maternity leave early, on doctor's orders—watching a cooking competition with the sound off, when the doorbell rang. Not a knock. Her mother had never rung the doorbell of this house in her life. Nora knew who it was before she got up.
Through the peephole, Diane looked small. That was the first thing. She'd always seemed tall to Nora, tall and quick and certain, a woman who walked into rooms already talking. On the porch she stood very still with her arms wrapped around a manila envelope, and the honey-colored hair had grown out a quarter inch at the roots, silver showing, and she was wearing no makeup at all. She looked every one of her fifty-two years and a few she hadn't gotten to yet.
Nora opened the door but didn't step back from it.
"I'm not here to—" Diane started, and stopped. "I'm not going to come in. Unless you want me to. I won't. I just. I got your letter."