She sat in the carrel until the librarian came to tell her they were closing. Then she walked home in the rain without her hood up and went straight to her room and lay on the floor and looked at the ceiling. Renee knocked at seven to ask if she wanted spaghetti. Nora said she wasn't hungry. Renee said, through the door, "Are you okay, honey?" and Nora said, "I'm fine, it's just debate," and Renee said, "Okay. I'll leave a plate in the oven," and Nora listened to her footsteps go down the stairs and thought: Do you know? Did you always know? Did you sit at that table and pass the salad and know?
She did not ask. That was the strange part, the part she couldn't explain even to Jess. She had won a state championship arguing that the Federal Reserve should be audited. She could cross-examine anyone. And she did not ask her father, or Renee, or her grandmother, a single question. Not that night. Not for eight months.
Instead, she had found the address.
It wasn't hard. Dana had gone back to her maiden name, Kessler. There was a Dana Kessler listed as a line lead on the employee recognition page of a seafood processing plant in Warrenton, ten minutes across the bay, in a photograph so small and blurry that Nora had enlarged it until it turned to colored squares. A dark-haired woman in a hairnet and a white rubber apron, holding a certificate. Crooked front tooth. Ten minutes across the bay.
There was a post office box. Nora wrote her a letter in January. It took her eleven days and nineteen drafts, and the final version was four sentences long.
I know where you were. I know you didn't leave because you wanted to. I don't know why nobody told me. I would like to see you.
She put her own cell phone number at the bottom, and her email, and then, after a long time, her name. Not Nora Lindqvist. Just Nora.
The answer came in February, in a plain white envelope with a Warrenton postmark that she intercepted from the mailbox at the end of the driveway because she'd been checking it twice a day for three weeks. Inside was a single card, the kind you buy in a drugstore, blank inside, with a watercolor of a heron on the front. The handwriting was small and slanted and careful, the handwriting of someone who had not written many letters in a long time.
Nora,
I read your letter every night. I am so proud of you I can't breathe sometimes. I see your name in the Daily Astorian, the debate and the honor roll. I cut them out.
A long time ago I made a promise to your father that I would stay away until you were grown, and I am going to keep it, because it is the only thing I have left that I did right. Please don't be angry at him. He has done the best he knew how. So has the woman who's been raising you. I know that from the paper too.