Nora did not know what to say. She looked at the notebook in her hands, and then at the young woman on the step, who had come with a stuffed loon the first time she visited, and who had been lied to on the same kitchen table, in the same trustworthy voice, about the same house.
"Thank you for bringing it," she said finally.
"Yeah." Brooke pulled her hood back up. "My dad says if your lawyer needs somebody to say what Dan told us, he'll say it under oath. He doesn't like being made a fool of in front of a room full of Lutherans." She almost smiled. "Neither do I, it turns out."
She went back down the walk. At the car she stopped and turned around.
"She cried for you," she said. "That whole first week. Every night. He'd tell me to let her cry it out and I'd sit outside the door and listen, and she'd just say it, over and over. Noni, Noni." Brooke's face crumpled briefly and then straightened. "I thought you should know that she didn't forget."
* * *
The mediation was held on the second Tuesday in January in a conference room on the fourth floor of the St. Louis County Courthouse, a granite building on the civic plaza with windows that looked down the hill toward the frozen harbor. The mediator was a retired judge named Halvard Strand, a lean, bald man with a white mustache who listened to everyone with the same expression of mild, patient sorrow, as if he had heard every possible version of this story and was still a little surprised by each one.
Daniel sat on one side of the table with his lawyer, a young man in an expensive suit who kept clicking his pen. Tessa and Nora sat on the other side with Maxine. Ruth sat in a chair against the wall, because she was not a party to anything, and had come anyway, and nobody had dared to tell her she could not.
Maxine laid it out. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. She slid copies across the table one by one: the servicer's payment history, obtained by subpoena, showing a reinstatement payment of ten thousand four hundred and twelve dollars and eighty cents in April and six monthly payments of one thousand seven hundred and forty dollars each, all marked THIRD PARTY, all drawn on an account in the name of Nora E. Brandt. The cashier's check, with its memo line. The yellow legal page, the original, in a plastic sleeve. The green notebook, open to the first page. A sworn affidavit from Gary Sundquist of Hudson, Wisconsin, recounting in plain insurance-man prose what Daniel had told him in September about the house being nearly paid off and the place on the North Shore. A sworn affidavit from Erik Halvorsen, who