Melissa looked at me.
“You’ve changed.”
“Your mother would disagree.”
“No. She’d say you finally became trainable.”
That was so exactly Dorothy that we both laughed until we cried.
Three weeks later, Melissa moved into a one-bedroom apartment five minutes from Havenwood.
She chose it herself.
Second floor.
Blue kitchen cabinets.
A narrow balcony overlooking a community garden.
Ava helped pick cushions for the sofa.
Calvin assembled a bookshelf and somehow installed one shelf backward.
I fixed it while he insisted the manufacturer had printed confusing directions.
Somewhere during those ordinary hours, our family stopped feeling like a mystery that needed solving.
We became people learning one another again.
The county investigation continued quietly.
DNA eventually confirmed that the woman whose ashes had been given to us was Nora Vance.
She had a younger sister living in Oregon.
Her name was Rebecca.
When Investigator Ortiz contacted her, Rebecca flew in.
