It was a day of drifting rain, the sky low. I remembered when I first moved here, how I’d felt like a desert woman finally taking water to the core. A lot of people got depressed in the Pacific Northwest, but I loved the slick streets and crawling mist. As I passed through Seattle on my way north to Everett, my years at the Post-Intelligencer didn’t seem so distant. In this particular rain, as if it had been falling from the day I left for New York, I felt as if my whole life were preserved here, untouched.

I couldn’t resist it. I parked on Elliott across from the P-I building and ate lunch in the driver’s seat, rain running off the windshield in cool rivulets. I crept with an old picture of myself hurrying in the early morning, coffee in one hand, umbrella in the other, aping my idea of a professional journalist. I’d been so proud of the globe that sat atop the building, as if its glory redounded to me. IT’S IN THE P-I wrapped around the aquamarine orb in classy red lettering, and a golden eagle spread its wings at the northern pole.

At once I felt the need to go into the P-I, find my old colleagues, tell them everything I’d done—relief.

My phone rang. I placed the lox-on-bagel on the dash and sucked some cream cheese off my thumb.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice came through. “Is this Whitney?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Louise, Lane’s mother, do you remember?”

“Of course,” I said, sitting upright. “How are you?”

“I hope you don’t mind my calling you. I asked for your number, but I didn’t want to bother you.”

“It’s no bother, really.”

“It’s my son’s work,” she said, “his notes for your book? I wondered if you were ready to return them. I’ve been trying to keep everything together, and it’s been making me nervous knowing you have all those papers, because you’re so busy, and things get lost.”

“Don’t worry, I’m on a reporting trip at the moment, but when I get back to the city, I’ll send them to you right away.”

“That would be wonderful, Whitney, thank you. Do you have a pen?”

I took down her address. She sounded determined, as if reclaiming his body from a foreign country. I wasn’t sure what I’d do.

“How is the book?” she asked.

“It’s only a proposal,” I said, “but it’s coming along, thanks in no small part to Lane’s notes.”

“He told me you made a great team.”

“We did.”

“He left a lot of work unfinished,” she said, and I heard her take a shaky breath.