Then Tessa saw her, and her face broke open, and she was Tessa again.
They held each other on the sidewalk for a long time. The bus pulled away. Snow blew past them in the orange streetlight.
"He told me you wanted to leave," Tessa said into Nora's shoulder. "On the phone. Two Sundays ago. He said you were burnt out and you were going back to St. Paul and he and Brooke had it handled. He said you'd asked him not to make a big deal about it." She pulled back and looked at Nora with wet, furious eyes. "He told me the house was fine. Every week. I asked him, Nor. I asked him every single week, because I knew, I knew there had to be bills, and he said don't worry about it, Tess, just get better. And I believed him, because I wanted to, because believing him meant I didn't have to think about it."
"I know."
"You paid it. With your House money."
"Some of it."
"Nora."
"It had your name on it," Nora said. "What was I supposed to do?"
They sat at Ruth's kitchen table until two in the morning, the three of them, with the clementines and a pot of decaf and the letter from Tessa's treatment team spread out between them. It said that Tessa M. Halvorsen had completed residential treatment and was in good standing in a supervised step-down program, that her postpartum psychosis had resolved fully and her underlying bipolar II disorder was well managed on her current medication, that she had been sober for eleven months, and that her treatment team supported her gradual reunification with her daughter under an appropriate plan. It was signed by two psychiatrists and a social worker. Tessa read it aloud in a flat voice, as though it were about someone else, and when she got to the end, she put it down and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
"I can't take her," she said. "Not yet. Not full time. I'm not ready, and she doesn't know me, and I'm not going to do to her what was done to me. I'm not going to be the woman who shows up after a year and yanks her out of the only life she knows." She took her hands away and looked at Nora. "But I'm not letting him tell a judge I abandoned her. And I'm not letting him tell a judge you're nobody."
"So what do we do?" Ruth asked.
Tessa looked at her mother-in-law for a long moment. Ruth looked back without blinking.