I miss him suddenly. In our study, where we worked on his memoirs, he sat by the desk or on the couch. We talked everything through before a word was written. He got sicker and sicker as the days went by, but his mind was still lucid. I wonder how he was at the end, but I don’t have the right to know that. I wasn’t there for him during his last days because I went to Detroit. How alone he must have been.

My phone rings.

I’m tempted to ignore it because I’m depressed and because it’s late, but the call is from a Toronto number. That can mean only one thing.

“Are you okay?” I ask Bonnie, as soon as I answer. “Did something happen?”

“Hi . . .” She takes a moment here to think of what to call me, then settles on nothing. “I didn’t think you’d answer.”

“Why did you call, then?”

She hesitates. “To say goodnight.”

I check the clock on the phone. “It’s two a.m. there.”

“I know.”

“Okay . . . goodnight.” I can’t think of what else to say, but this is clearly the wrong choice because she replies with a curt “’Night” and hangs up.

What was that about? I have no idea, but I know that I handled it—whatever it was—badly. There’s no winning with teenagers.

With the brass key around my neck, I sit in the darkness with Whisper at my side and watch the neon pink light of the Szechuan place across the street stream from the open window into the room.

Dawn can’t come soon enough.

7

That was a mess, Bonnie thinks, after she hangs up.

She’d called Nora for a reason, and it wasn’t to say goodnight at two a.m. Like an idiot.

In her room, propped up on her bed with her sketchpad in front of her, Bonnie frowns at the bit of nothing she’s drawn, an uneven attempt at sketching Nora’s face. She’s been at it all night, and it’s still the worst drawing she’s done in years. The only reason she’s even doing it is because she’s regretting the way she treated Nora when she’d just showed up out of nowhere.

Bonnie hadn’t expected to see her birth mom in front of her all of a sudden.

She’d just gotten off the streetcar and was putting away her headphones because she rarely wore them while walking alone anymore. Then she’d looked up from the knot of wires and there was Nora, looking beyond tired. This woman, this stranger that she didn’t immediately recognize as her mother.

She didn’t know what to do, so she didn’t even say hello. Didn’t even ask her inside.