breathless, embarrassed laugh. "I didn't know what else to do while I waited." Ruby took the bag back to the kitchen and replaced the cold biscuits with warm ones, refusing the extra money he held out because reheating them was part of the service. When she returned, Ezekiel asked her to leave the second biscuit wrapped. "She may come someday," he said. "I'd like to know I was ready."
Daniel gave Ezekiel a telephone number for the intermediary and offered to arrange a private call before any face-to-face meeting. He also gave him an envelope from Elizabeth, which was sealed and addressed in careful handwriting. Ezekiel did not open it while they watched. He placed it inside his shirt, over the pocket where he had kept the old photograph for nearly four decades. Then he asked if he might have a few minutes alone. Edith understood, and Daniel escorted her back outside to the white sedan, where she stood looking at the diner window until her son gently asked her to sit down.
Ruby was clearing the adjoining booth when Ezekiel called her name. "Would you mind reading something for me? My eyes aren't what they were." She offered to fetch his glasses instead, but he shook his head. "I can see the words. I'm just not sure I can hold them still." He handed her the letter with trembling fingers, and she unfolded a single page of cream-colored stationery. The handwriting was steady, but several words had been crossed out, as though the writer had struggled to decide what she was brave enough to say.
Elizabeth had written that she remembered a white porch, a woman singing while sewing, and a man who smelled of rain and machine oil when he came home. She remembered being called Bea, but the people who adopted her had been told her parents were deceased, and she had been frightened to question the story too loudly. She had loved her adoptive parents, both of whom were now dead, and she wanted him to understand that loving them had not erased the loneliness of never knowing where she came from. She could not promise what would happen next. But if he was willing, she wanted to hear his voice, and she wanted to know what her mother had been like when she laughed.
Ruby reached the end of the letter and paused before returning it. Ezekiel watched the light on the tabletop, his eyes shining but no longer empty. "She remembers the porch," he said. "Hazel painted it every spring, even when the boards didn't need paint. She used to say a home ought to look like somebody was expecting good news." He put the letter beside his coffee and touched Ruby's wrist gently. "Would you bring me a sheet of paper? I'd like to answer before I get scared and change my mind."
Ruby found a clean notepad in the kitchen office, and Ezekiel spent the next hour writing slowly. He did not list all the hardships he and Hazel had endured or tell Elizabeth how much gratitude she owed them for their searching. He wrote about the porch, her mother's laugh, the