Of course, the omissions mattered more as they got older. Slowly, the list became longer or more relevant or both. Esther lost touch with Hope entirely sometime in high school, but for a while before that they saw each other a couple of times a year.

Esther had a fantasy around then, when she thought that she was very wise and very worldly and Hope lived in a glass coffin. Hope would be visiting her, sitting on her pink quilted coverlet, and then she’d say that she wanted to read Esther’s books. She felt as if the world were keeping a secret from her. Her face would be pale and sweet as cake frosting, and Esther would trip over herself pulling books down from the shelves, scrambling to finally, finally give them a common language again. She would start Hope with Anais, open the book in her lap, pressing warm shoulder to warm shoulder on the bed until their bones slid together.

Or, after reading several stories, Hope would confess, haltingly, like she barely knew the words for it. She would say, “I think there’s something wrong with me,” and then just sit there, trying to chip language out of the silence. Esther would listen to her like a doctor, waiting for Hope to hook and dredge out all her feelings. And then she’d say, “It’s okay. It’s actually okay.” She’d put her arms around Hope, and she’d kiss her just to show her that it was.

* * *

Cora gets Esther for lunch at eleven. Esther feels like she has barely been in the library. It’s horribly strange to lift her head and see Cora silhouetted in the winter light, the acute angles of her elbows and the windy mane of her hair. She feels as if she has been snapped back to reality from the stretch of a long rubber band. Esther pulls her hands painfully away from the life-warm paper and follows Cora out into the daylight.

“Did you find it?”

Esther turns her shoulder toward Cora as they walk and wishes she had enough hair to hide her face. “I’m working up to it.”

Cora considers her. “Working up to it?”

Something less lovely Esther is beginning to notice about Cora: how she can accuse without accusing. She’s one of the least confrontational people Esther’s ever met, and Esther doesn’t know how to feel about that, but it lays an additional weight on her gentle questions. “It’s all her letters and things,” Esther says. “I mean, I want to see everything. I know we don’t have time for me to see everything, but I’m not going to skip right to the end.”

When Esther tried to explain Anais to Cora properly, it was something she was angry to find she didn’t really have words for, could only come at sideways by telling stories about herself. The credit she gives Cora is that she listened even without understanding, but Esther does wish now that she had understood.