Chapter 3: What the Woman Knew
Daniel wanted to call the police.
We were back in the hotel room, the note on the bed between us, and he was pacing the strip of floor between the window and the door the way he does when he's trying not to say something he'll regret.
"She knows where Nora is," he said.
"That's a crime.
That's been a crime for eight years."
"I know."
"We should call Detective Marsh.
We should call him right now."
"Daniel." I picked up the note.
"Nora wrote this.
Nora told me to be careful.
If I call Marsh and he sends a unit to that address tonight, what happens to her?"
He stopped pacing.
He didn't answer.
"She'll run," I said.
"The woman told us that.
And Nora told us that too, in her own way.
Be careful.
Not come find me.
Not call for help.
Be careful."
He sat down on the edge of the bed.
His hands were clasped between his knees.
"She's been alive this whole time," he said.
It came out quiet.
Almost like a question.
"Yes."
"Eight years, and she never—" He stopped.
"I know," I said.
"I know."
We sat with that for a while.
The window was open and I could hear the boardwalk below — music from somewhere, the low pull of the ocean.
Sounds I had avoided for eight years.
They didn't feel the same now.
At nine o'clock I told Daniel I was going alone.
"Absolutely not."
"She said come alone."
"She's a stranger who grabbed your wrist and walked away.
You don't know who she is or what that address is."
"I know that my daughter wrote four words on that paper." I folded the note and put it in my jacket pocket.
"And I know that Nora has been afraid of something for eight years.
I'm not going to be the reason she runs again."
He drove me.
He parked two blocks away and gave me his phone with the location shared to mine.
We didn't argue about it.
It was the compromise we'd always been able to find, even in the worst years — the years of grief counselors and missing persons anniversaries and the Christmas mornings that never got easier.
The address was a small house set back from a side street, three blocks from the water.
A light was on behind a curtain in the front room.
A wind chime moved on the porch.
I knocked.
The woman from the café opened the door.
She'd changed out of the cover-up.
She was wearing a plain grey cardigan and she looked older in the indoor light — tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
"You came alone?"
"My husband is nearby.
He knows where I am."
She looked past me at the empty street, then stepped back.
"Come in," she said.
"Her name is Nora.
She goes by that still.
I want you to know that before anything else — she kept her name."
My throat closed.
I followed her inside.
The front room was small and neat.
A couch, a low table, a bookshelf with paperbacks arranged by color.
On the table there was a mug of tea and beside it, face-down, a photograph.
The woman sat in the chair across from the couch.
I sat.
"My name is Ruth," she said.
"I've known your daughter for six years.
She came to me through a women's shelter two towns over.
She was twenty-two.
She'd been living rough for about eighteen months before that."
The room went very still.
"Living rough," I repeated.
"Sleeping where she could.
Working cash jobs.
Staying off anything that could be traced." Ruth wrapped both hands around her own mug.
"She was terrified.
She'd been terrified for a long time."
"Of what?"
Ruth looked at me steadily.
"That's what she needs to tell you herself." She reached over and turned the photograph face-up on the table.
A young woman.
Dark hair pulled back.
Standing in front of a garden gate, squinting into the sun — the same way she always squinted, the same tilt of her chin, the same girl I had watched walk away down a beach.
Twenty-four years old in the photograph.
Maybe twenty-five.
My daughter.
"She knows you're here," Ruth said.
"She saw you on the boardwalk this afternoon before you saw me.
She's the one who sent me to you."
I couldn't speak.
"She wants to see you," Ruth said.
"But she's scared.
Not of you.
Of what she has to tell you."
The wind chime moved on the porch.
"Where is she?" I asked.
Ruth glanced toward the hallway behind her.
"She's been sitting in the kitchen for the last two hours," she said.
"Working up the courage."
A floorboard shifted somewhere in the back of the house.
May you like
Then a voice — older, careful, but unmistakable.
"Mom?"
