“I never thought you would,” she says, sweeping a lock of black hair off her face. The hair doesn’t seem to want to stay in the bun. Pieces of it slip out to frame her face. She gazes at me with the most piercing look I’ve ever been on the receiving end of. “You know, when I used to think about who my birth mom was, I never imagined you. Okay, that sounds really bad! Sorry. I mean, I’ve met you, we text, and I send you those dumb photos, and still. You’re, like, a mystery.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. Tell me something.”

“Wait. I’ll do one better.” I hand her the key from around my neck, still on its leather string. “This belonged to my mother. It was from her home, back in Palestine.”

“Palestine?”

“Yes.”

“How . . . how did she get here?”

“From Palestine, she lived on the outskirts of a refugee camp in Lebanon. Someone sponsored her to come to Canada, and she eventually went to Detroit for a wedding. That’s where she met my dad. In Detroit,” I say. “This is all I have of her.”

“My grandmother . . . what was she like?”

“I don’t know.” Then I laugh. “I have no answers about her. She left when I was a kid. But I can tell you about your grandfather—my dad. That’s why I went to the States. I was looking for clues about his life. He was born in Winnipeg, but he grew up in Detroit. He was . . . his friend told me he was a good man. He was kind.”

“That’s why you were there? And how you met Nate Marlowe?”

“Yes. Your grandfather was adopted, like you, but he knew nothing about his birth family. He spent his whole life trying to find out.”

She puts the key around her neck while I tell her what little I know about my father. Lynn comes into the kitchen at some point and fills a glass of water from the tap. But she doesn’t leave after. She lingers with us, listening. It doesn’t feel like an intrusion, her being there. It feels like the most natural thing in the world.

It’s enough, maybe, to help me forget life outside this cabin in the woods. Just for a little while. Talking to her now, in the hush of this kitchen, I am able to push aside the thought that Brazuca hasn’t responded to my message telling him that I would be away tonight.

Also the memory of him limping away from Edison Lam’s car like he has no care in the world, while I clenched Whisper’s leash in my fist and led her away, deep into an alley behind me, into the shadows, around and back to a place where I could watch him go while still remaining hidden.