Chapter 3: I Will Find You
Mom's voice had gone very quiet when she read those four words.
"*I am still here.*"
That was what Nora had written on the back of the photograph.
Not goodbye.
Not I loved you.
Not I'm sorry I had to go.
*I am still here.*
Leila had gone completely still in my arms.
I could feel her breathing — shallow, uneven — but she didn't make a sound.
Mom set the photograph down on the table as if it were made of something that could break.
"What does that mean?" Leila finally said.
Her voice came out small.
"What did she mean by that?"
"I don't know," Mom said.
"She was eleven years old." Leila pulled back from me and looked at the photograph.
"She was eleven and she wrote that.
How did she even — how did she know to write that?"
Mom sat down heavily in the chair closest to her.
The birthday cake sat untouched at the center of the table, candles unlit.
"She asked me for the photo herself," Mom said.
"The nurse took it.
Nora told her exactly how she wanted us to stand.
She was very specific about it." Mom pressed her fingers to her lips.
"I thought she just wanted a picture of the three of you together."
"She planned all of this," I said.
Mom nodded slowly.
"She started asking about the box about two months before she passed.
She wanted a wooden one.
She asked me to keep it somewhere safe and not open it." Mom looked at her hands.
"She made me promise."
"She was ten when she asked you that," Leila said.
"Yes."
Leila stood up from the table and walked to the window.
She stood with her back to us for a long moment.
"She knew she wasn't going to make it," Leila said.
"She knew and she spent those last months thinking about us.
About what we would need." Her voice cracked on the last word.
"While we were busy pretending everything was fine, she was writing us letters."
I looked down at the letter still in my hand.
I had only read the first line.
*Don't be sad on our birthday.
I need you to promise me that.*
I made myself read the next line.
*I know you will want to cry.
That's okay.
But after the crying, I need you to do something for me.*
I read it aloud without meaning to.
Mom looked up.
Leila turned from the window.
"Keep reading," Leila said.
My hands were shaking badly enough that the paper trembled.
*I need you to look after each other the way I always looked after both of you.
Not because I'm asking you to.
Because you already know how.
You just forget sometimes.*
*You forget that you are enough.
You forget that the two of you together are more than most people get in a whole lifetime.*
*I never forgot.*
*I am still here.
I always will be.
Look for me in the right places and you'll find me.*
*All my love, always — Nora.*
The room was completely silent.
Then Leila crossed back to the table, sat down beside me, and picked up her own letter.
She held it for a moment without opening it.
Then she looked at Mom.
"What does yours say?"
Mom shook her head.
"I haven't opened it yet either."
The three of us sat there — the opened box between us, the photograph face-up on the table, Nora smiling from the middle of a hospital room like she had no reason not to.
Leila reached across and took my hand again.
"She wrote three separate letters," Leila said quietly.
"She thought about what each of us would need to hear.
Specifically.
Individually." She exhaled.
"She was ten years old."
Mom picked up her envelope.
Her name was on the front in that same careful handwriting.
She turned it over once, then set it back down.
"I'm not ready," she said.
"Not yet."
None of us were.
But we stayed at that table together, and that felt like something Nora would have wanted — the three of us, still in the same room, still holding on.
Then Leila said something that changed the direction of the whole morning.
"There's something else in the box."
I looked.
She was right.
Beneath where the photograph had rested, pressed flat against the bottom, was a small folded piece of paper we had all missed.
Thinner than the letters.
Different paper entirely.
Leila reached in and unfolded it carefully.
Her face changed as she read it.
"What is it?" I asked.
May you like
She looked up at me, then at Mom.
"It's an address," she said.
