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.

Cora’s arm closes around her shoulders, and Esther realizes she is steering her away from the road, which, yes, she’d been about to step into.

“It makes sense to go in order,” Esther protests, leaning her cheek into Cora’s thready coat. “But everything by the end of tomorrow. I promise.”

Cora lets it go so easily that it makes Esther’s stomach hurt. Cora chatters amicably about her morning, some monuments and an exhibit on Japanese photography. She takes her phone out and swipes through photographs, a child blowing a bubble so big that it distorts her, a model splayed in a field before a bridge, her robe falling away from an exposed breast. She is so stark, so confrontationally beautiful, that Esther looks away with a hard swallow bobbing in her throat.