"I move up here," Tessa said. "I finish the program and transfer to outpatient in Duluth. Nor and I get a place together, a duplex, something close to Tenth Avenue. I ask for joint custody, and a schedule that starts small and grows. And I ask the court to put it in writing that when Linnea isn't with Daniel, she's with me, and when she isn't with me, she's with the person who raised her."
Ruth nodded slowly. Then she got up, went to the cupboard, and came back with a bottle of aquavit that had a layer of dust on the shoulder, and three tiny cut-glass glasses.
"I don't drink," Tessa said.
"I know, dear. It isn't for you." Ruth poured two glasses, one for herself and one for Nora, and a third of water from the tap, and slid it across to Tessa. "Skål," she said, "to the women in this family who write things down."
* * *
Brooke came to Ruth's house on the first Thursday in December. Nora saw the car first, through the picture window—Brooke's little white Honda, the one that had been in the driveway on Tenth Avenue every morning in October—and then Brooke herself, coming up the front walk in a parka with the hood up, holding something against her chest in a gallon-size Ziploc bag.
Ruth answered the door. Brooke did not come in.
"I'm going back to Hudson," she said to Nora, over Ruth's shoulder. "My lease up here runs through January, but I've got a friend who's going to sublet. I just—I wanted to give you this before I go."
She held out the Ziploc. Inside it, flattened and slightly damp at one corner, was a spiral notebook with a green cardboard cover. On the front, in Nora's small square block capitals, it said 1418 E 10TH.
Nora took it. Her hands were shaking. She opened it through the plastic, and the folded yellow page was still there, tucked inside the back cover, Daniel's signature sprawled across the bottom in blue ballpoint.
"Where did you find it?"
"In the desk in the back room. The bottom drawer, under a bunch of envelopes he never opened." Brooke laughed a little, unsteadily. "I was looking for my passport. I'd kept it in that desk. Isn't that funny? I put my passport in there because he told me it was the safest place in the house."
"Brooke—"
"He told me so many things." She pushed back her hood. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but her voice was steady. "He told me you'd been sort of stuck since your sister got sick, that you didn't really have anywhere to go. He told me he felt sorry for you. He told me you were weird about the baby, that you'd gotten too attached, that it wasn't healthy for her and he was going to have to handle it for her sake. And I believed him. I helped him pack your room." She swallowed. "I folded your sweaters, Nora. I'm the one who folded them."