The next was shorter.
"Ellie,
Noah has your temper. He threw his bottle across the room today because the milk was, and I quote his face, wrong. I picked it up and wanted to throw it too.
I am scared, Ellie. Writing that down so I cannot take it back. I am scared I am not enough for him.
Call me sometime. Not for advice. Just to hear your voice.
Love,
Claire"
I did not call. I answered her voicemail three days later with "work's been insane," and she said "it's fine, Ellie, really," with Noah crying in the background.
The last envelope was thinner. No date, but the postmark said November 14th. Nine days before the crash.
My hands finally shook.
"Ellie,
Noah is asleep on my chest as I write this and I do not want to move ever again. He smells like soap and he trusts me completely, and it terrifies me how much I love him.
The roads are getting bad and I drive them every night. I need you to hear this in my handwriting, so you cannot pretend I never said it.
If anything happens to me, take him, Ellie. Promise me. Not the system. Not strangers. You. He is your blood and you are the strongest person I know, and you think you are not built for this, but you are. You are built for everything. That is the most annoying thing about you.
Promise me. Write it back to me. I need the words.
All my love, always,
Claire"
I read it twice, standing now, the letter shaking in my hand.
"I never wrote back," I said. The loft gave me nothing. "I never wrote back, Claire. I didn't even open it."
The photograph was still on the table. Ellie plus Noah, three months. Her handwriting on the back, round and certain.
I picked up my phone. 2:14 in the morning.
Thomas answered on the second ring. "Ms. Vance."
"She wrote me," I said. "Eleven years of letters I never opened. The last one says promise me, and I signed a waiver instead. I signed him away, and she was already dead, and she knew. She wrote it anyway."
Rain on his end, maybe. "You've been carrying this since Rhinebeck," he said.
"I've been carrying this for eleven years," I said, and then I was crying, properly crying, the kind that shakes your shoulders. "He screamed at me, Thomas. In the rain. He said I abandoned him. A ten-year-old boy was right."
"I know," Thomas said quietly.
"I was thirty years old and I thought grief was something you survived by working harder." I pressed the heel of my hand into my eye. "She's gone, Thomas, and all I have is her handwriting."
"You have the boy," he said.
The crying stopped, like a door closing.
"What?"
"Claire's gone, Ms. Vance. That's eleven years settled. But the boy is still here. You can't answer her letter. You can answer him."
I sat down hard.
"Thomas."
"Yes."
"Thank you. For all of it."
"Get some sleep, Ms. Vance."
I did not sleep. I sat at the table until the rain thinned and the sky over the Hudson turned the color of wet concrete, her letters in a row, the last one on top.
Promise me.
I opened my laptop.
The guardianship petition forms were already in my files, pulled weeks ago "just in case," filed under due diligence.
I started typing.
Chapter 11: Noah Speaks
I went back to Covenant Shelter on Thursday, four days after the rain. Thomas parked two blocks away. A black town car outside a shelter is a kind of noise. The rain had stopped, but the sidewalk still smelled like wet concrete and diesel. I stood outside the door a full minute before my hand could push it.
Marta Reyes met me in the intake office. "He's in the common room," she said. "He knows you're coming. That doesn't mean he's glad."
"Fair."
"Ms. Vance." She touched my sleeve. "Let him set the pace."
I nodded. My throat had closed somewhere in the stairwell.
The common room smelled like bleach and microwaved lunch. A television murmured in the corner, sound off. Noah sat on a couch that had given up its springs, a paperback open face-down on his knee. He wasn't reading it. He was watching the door. Dez sat on the floor, building something out of sugar packets.
"You came back," Noah said. It wasn't a greeting. It was an accusation with the safety on.
"Yes," I said. "Can I sit?"
He shrugged. I took the armchair across from him. Sitting next to him felt like something I hadn't earned.