be listed for sale in the spring. And a provision, which Maxine had drafted and which Daniel's lawyer had fought for two hours before Daniel himself told him to stop, that before any division of the proceeds, the sum of twenty thousand eight hundred and fifty-two dollars and eighty cents would be paid in full to Nora E. Brandt, together with statutory interest from the date of each payment.
When it was done, Daniel stood up and walked around the table. Maxine moved, almost imperceptibly, to put herself between him and her clients. He stopped in front of Nora.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't expect you to—I'm sorry."
Nora looked at him. She thought of the man in the truck in the hospital parking lot, with his forehead on the steering wheel. She thought of the man asleep on the couch with the baby on his chest. She thought of the man turning his body so that a crying child would face the wall.
"I know you are," she said. "Be sorry to her. For a long time. That's the only kind of sorry that's going to count."
* * *
The blue house on Tenth Avenue East sold in May to a young couple from Minneapolis who had fallen in love with the spindles on the porch. Daniel had restored them himself in the first summer, before everything, and the listing photos made them look like lace.
Nora and Tessa rented the upper half of a duplex on Ninth Street, four blocks away, with a sloping kitchen floor and a claw-foot tub and a back window from which, if you leaned out far enough, you could see a narrow slice of the lake. They painted the small bedroom the color of the inside of a shell. When a coding job opened up at St. Mary's, the hospital where Linnea had been born, Nora took it. The check from the house sale cleared in June. She deposited it in the account she still called the House, and when she checked the balance that night, late, in the kitchen, she sat for a while with her hand over her mouth.
It was not everything she had lost. It was not the nine years, and it was not the bungalow with the garden, not yet. But it was a beginning, and it was hers, and it had her name on it.
On a warm evening at the end of June, the three of them walked Linnea down to the canal in her stroller to watch the boats come in. Ruth came too, on Nora's arm, in a cardigan and her good shoes. Daniel met them there. It was his evening, under the schedule, but he had texted that afternoon to ask if they all wanted to come, and Tessa had looked at Nora, and Nora had shrugged, and so here they were, standing at the railing on the pier with the evening sun going gold on the water and the tourists eating ice cream around them.