Esther buries her face in Cora’s shoulder, her warm skin and the cheap cotton strap of her tank top. She breathes. Cora’s hand strokes up her back, hovers at the crest of Esther’s spine, a warm ghost of a touch, and then settles on the back of her skull. Cora cups her gently as an egg, and Esther nearly cries from it.

“I wish . . .” Cora’s voice startles Esther, and she hesitates a moment, so Esther knocks her forehead against the soft skin of Cora’s neck, not sure whether she is reassuring or seeking reassurance. Regardless, Cora is warm there. “I’m sorry. I wish I understood enough to help.”

Esther wishes she did too. Esther wishes she had better language for what she was feeling, or any language at all. She wishes she didn’t feel so close to some wretched, adolescent cliché—nobody understands me. When Esther was an adolescent, though, Anais had seemed to understand her, in a way so complete and novel that Esther had felt a window open between their two lives. The hubris of this, in retrospect, is humiliating. Still, Esther takes a wavering breath and presses her mouth to the hot, thin skin just below Cora’s jaw, where she can feel Cora’s pulse beating against her lips. Still she says, “It’s all right, that’s all right,” and then “I’m glad you’re here.” After a moment, Cora begins to stroke her hair.

* * *

Cora suggests they go to the Smithsonian that afternoon, but Esther returns to the library. She doesn’t explain herself, though Cora also doesn’t try to make her. She pulls Box 31 again, Folder C. She lifts that letter. Isn’t it strange that she wants to read it again? But Esther wants to make herself know it.

There is another letter under it in the folder, and Esther lifts it only because the handwriting is unfamiliar.

The tag on it designates the sender as Obel, Emily. And Esther scoffs, a sound that catches roughly in her throat. She looks at the librarian with his curly head bent over his keyboard. She could laugh at him. You ass, she thinks, you filed it wrong.

A

I have been thinking of you very often since we last spoke. I am sorry that it took me so long to write, and there is more that I would like to say to you than I think I can say. I hope that Trudy and Ben are well, and that Leonard is well also, and that you are the very best of all of them.