“Then you find that girl,” she said. “You find her tomorrow.”
Kiara Booker was not hard to find.
She was twenty-five, a dental hygienist in the next county, and she had not changed her number, because — she told me later — some part of her had never stopped waiting for a call from Alder Street that never came.
I called from the porch.
I don’t know why.
It seemed like the right place.
“Hello?”
“Kiara Booker? My name is Nia. You don’t know me. I was — your grandfather’s daughter paid me, for eleven months, to sit on his porch every Sunday and pretend to be you.”
Silence.
“He passed three weeks ago. I’m so sorry. I know you—”
“I know he passed,” she said, and her voice was flat and terrible. “I read it in the paper. Nobody called me. I stood at the back of the fun*ral and left before the end. Why are you calling me?”
