Instead there was some rambling about her nightmares from the time she’d been kidnapped. It sounded as though she blamed Nora for what had happened to her, but she didn’t mean it like that at all. She was scared for Nora. Seeing her there in person did nothing to calm her fears. She’s as scared for Nora as she is relieved that her real mom, Lynn, had adopted her. It’s a bad thought because Nora isn’t a terrible person. She just struggled and was hurt and couldn’t look after Bonnie even if she’d wanted to. Bonnie knows all that, she does.

She was just too surprised to remember it all on the phone. The sound of Nora’s voice like sand. Empty as the desert.

Bonnie flips through last month’s sketchpad and takes a couple of photos of the tattoo she’s been drawing, the one she’d seen on her birth father. It’s of talons, dripping with blood.

It’s these photos she sends to Nora because something tells her that this is what their bond is based on. The time that she was kidnapped, the hurt and the fear, then the hope when she’d learned that her birth mom had come looking for her after all. That she did care.

So what if she couldn’t ask Nora inside? At least they had something. They both faced the people who had taken her, both faced that fear. Her mom Lynn had been scared, too, but it wasn’t the same. Lynn hadn’t gone searching the way Nora had. Lynn thought Bonnie had run away, which was fair because she’d done it so many times before, but it had been Nora who’d tried to rescue her.

And Lynn doesn’t know what it’s like to feel as though you’re being followed.

After hip-hop class this evening Bonnie felt eyes on her the entire streetcar ride home, but she couldn’t figure out who’d been looking. It was the same feeling she got some mornings before heading to school.

It was just a feeling, but after she’d been kidnapped, feelings like this were impossible to ignore.

This is what she wanted to talk to Nora about, something she instinctively knows Nora will understand. But she couldn’t find the words when it mattered. It hasn’t even been two years since she first saw her birth mom. When she’d been younger, she thought they would have so much to talk about. She’d imagined the conversations they’d have. It was stupid, but she always felt that talking to the woman who brought her into the world would be easy.

Easy doesn’t even come close.

Every now and then they’d send photos, though, and for a while it had been enough. Images from their days, their lives. It was something. But maybe it’s not enough anymore.