"You can't be here," she said, even though Hannah plainly was. "I mean, I thought you were in Harrisburg. I wrote to the address they gave me for years. Nobody ever answered."
"I know," Hannah said. "I didn't know then. I know now."
Nia's stomach tightened. "What does that mean?"
Hannah closed the locket carefully and laid it on the table between them. She explained that after Evelyn died, a woman named Margaret Quinn, her mother's older sister, had taken her to live in a house outside Harrisburg. Margaret provided clean clothes, good schools, and every practical thing the little girl needed. What she could not provide was an answer when Hannah asked why Nia had not come with her.
"She told me you wanted a new family," Hannah said. "That you were older, and you had decided it would be easier without a little kid following you around. I believed her because I was eight. By the time I was old enough to question it, I was ashamed that I had believed it at all."
Nia pulled out the opposite bench and sat down before her legs gave way. "I waited beside the phone for months," she said. "I asked every adult who came near me. They said your case was private, and that I should be grateful somebody wanted to adopt me. When Josie Brooks took me in, I loved her, but I asked her to help me find you. She tried. There were rules and closed files and people who said we needed to move on."
"Did you ever think I forgot you?" Hannah asked.
"Every birthday," Nia replied. "And every time it rained."
Hannah pressed her lips together. "I used to put a second mug of cocoa on the kitchen table whenever there was a storm. Margaret hated it. She called it childish, but I kept doing it until I left for college."
A memory opened in Nia's mind: the two of them sitting under a quilt on Evelyn's porch, drinking cocoa from mismatched blue mugs while rain drummed on the metal roof. Hannah had always wanted extra marshmallows, but she couldn't pronounce the word and called them snow pillows. Nia laughed once, a startled sound that hurt as much as it comforted. "Snow pillows," she said.
Hannah's face crumpled. "You remember."
"I remember everything," Nia answered. "That was the problem."
They sat in silence until Elsie shifted in Hannah's arms. Nia reached automatically for the clean towel on the bench and laid it within easy reach. The movement reminded her that the woman in front of her was still exhausted and cold, whatever else she might be. Her questions could wait until Hannah had eaten the rest of her soup.
"I wasn't sure it was you," Hannah said after a while. "A few months ago I found an article online about a waitress who helped stranded drivers during last winter's ice storm. Your name was under the photograph. Nia Brooks. I kept looking at your face, and I saw something I remembered, but nineteen years can change people."