Chapter 9 - NORA HAD WRITTEN TO ME FOR YEARS
There were eighty-seven letters.
I did not read them immediately.
That decision surprised everyone, including me.
“They’re hers,” I said.
“Nora decides.”
For eight years, other people had decided what happened to her words.
I would not become one more.
When Nora learned the letters existed, she cried for nearly an hour.
Then she asked to see them alone.
The next morning, she brought me three.
“Not all.”
“Whatever you want.”
The first was from age seventeen.
Mom,
I know Lydia says you’re gone, but sometimes I remember you yelling at me for leaving wet towels on the bed and dead people don’t feel that annoying in my memories.
I laughed and cried at the same time.
The second:
Today I saw a woman brushing her daughter’s hair at the mall. I got angry at her for no reason. I think I was angry because I remembered you.
The third was written two years ago.
If you are alive, I hope you didn’t stop loving me because I didn’t come home.
I could barely finish.
“Nora.”
She looked at me.
“I never stopped.”
“I know that now.”
She did not hug me.
Not yet.
But she moved her chair closer.
That felt enormous.
Then Michael asked whether she wanted to return home with us.
Nora shook her head.
“I can’t.”
His disappointment flashed.
He hid it quickly.
Good.
“I have a job here.”
“Yes.”
“My apartment.”
“Yes.”
“Ruth.”
“Yes.”
Then:
“I want to come home someday.”
I covered my mouth.
“But not yet.”
“Okay.”
She looked relieved.
Permission again.
She needed to know reunion would not become another cage.
Then legal work began restoring her identity.
Her birth certificate had never vanished.
She was always Nora Vance legally.
Lydia’s “Eleanor Mercer” documents were mostly fabricated layers over the original identity.
Still, correcting employment, health, school, and tax records would take time.
Nora decided something herself.
“I want to keep Nell.”
I blinked.
“As your name?”
“My middle name.”
Nora Eleanor Vance.
The false life had hurt her.
But eight years could not simply be deleted.
There were friends inside it.
Jobs.
Books she loved.
A version of herself that survived.
I understood.
Then Ruth returned the turquoise cover-up.
She folded it carefully and placed it between us.
Nora touched the crooked sun.
Her face changed.
“Grandma.”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything else of hers?”
“A lot.”
My mother had kept boxes for Nora until the day she died.
Clothes.
Birthday cards.
Her sewing kit.
A quilt she never finished.
Nora cried.
Then whispered:
“Did she leave me anything?”
I nodded.
“A letter.”
My mother wrote one every year Nora was missing.
Five letters.
One for every birthday she missed before she died.
Nora stared at me.
May you like
I had spent years saving words for a daughter I feared would never read them.
And now she was finally ready to hear her grandmother’s voice again.
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