“You literally recognized me from childhood and didn’t tell me.”
“I know.”
“You went to coffee already knowing who I was.”
“Yes.”
“And I knew nothing.”
Claire shut her eyes for a second.
“Yes. I meant to tell you that day.”
I picked up the photograph again and tapped the newer handwriting.
“You wrote this before you saw me again.”
I looked at the date once more.
“Were you ever going to tell me? Where was this taken?”
“The old Pine Street library.”
I frowned.
“Didn’t they gut that place years ago?”
“The original children’s room is still there,” she said. “They rebuilt around it.”
Then small pieces started coming back to me.
Low bookshelves.
Beanbags.
A paper sun hanging crooked from a ceiling tile.
I could almost smell the dusty carpet.
Then another detail surfaced.
Yellow.
I stared harder at the photograph.
“Her glasses were yellow.”
Claire blinked.
“What?”
“Nora’s glasses. They were yellow.”
Claire looked down at the picture.
“They were purple.”
“No,” I said. “They were yellow.”
She stared at me for a moment.
Then she laughed.
“She painted them.”
“What?”
“With yellow nail polish. My mother almost lost her mind.”
The memory arrived so suddenly that I had to sit down.
A girl sitting cross-legged in thick yellow glasses, holding a paperback much too close to her face.
I still couldn’t remember what book she was reading.
But I remembered being annoyed with her.
“You want to go there?” Claire asked.
I looked up at her.
She immediately realized what she’d done.
“Sorry. Wrong question.”
A moment passed.
Then she tried again.
“If you want to know where the picture came from, I’ll tell you here. Or I can show you. Or I can leave.”
It was the first thing she’d said all evening that didn’t sound as though she’d already decided what was best for me.
I grabbed my jacket.
“Take me to the library.”
Claire changed out of the green dress without saying another word.
Twenty minutes later, we were standing beneath the fluorescent lights inside the Pine Street branch.
The adult section looked completely unfamiliar to me.
The children’s room didn’t.
It was smaller than I remembered.
Far smaller.
I moved slowly past the shelves until I reached the back corner.
“There used to be a blue rug.”
Claire pointed. “Right there.”
Now the rug was gray.
I lowered myself into one of the small chairs at a little table.
My knees barely fit underneath.
Claire remained near the doorway.
I looked around the room.
Then I noticed a display filled with adventure books.
Another piece of memory returned.
Nora slamming a book shut.
Me accusing her of skipping three pages.
Her telling me I was just slow.
I laughed before I meant to.
Claire didn’t ask what was funny.
“She cheated,” I said.
“Oh, constantly.”
“She skipped ahead.”
“Also constantly.”
“I hated that.”
“She knew.”
I glanced over at Claire.
She smiled, but the smile wasn’t really for me.
It belonged to someone who wasn’t there anymore.
I hated how much that hurt.
“Was she sick?” I asked.
Claire looked briefly toward the doorway before answering.
“Yes.”
There it was.
The truth she’d apparently been carrying toward me for the past six months.
“How sick?”
“She had a chronic condition from childhood. That summer was one of the better stretches.”
“So she came here?”
“Every week she could.”
Claire came closer but stopped on the opposite side of the table.
“She hated people asking about her health before they asked her name.”
I looked at the empty chair beside me.
“I didn’t know.”
“That was why she liked you.”
I gave Claire a sharp look.
“Don’t turn me into some saintly eight-year-old.”
Claire almost smiled.
“You weren’t. You made her cry once because you said she cheated at Uno.”
“Did she?”
“Absolutely.”
Despite everything, I laughed.
It lasted maybe two seconds.
Then the question I’d been avoiding came back.
“What happened to her?”
Claire pulled out the chair across from me.
“Can I sit?”
I nodded.
She sat down.
“Near the end of that summer, our mom took Nora out of town for specialized treatment. Everybody thought she’d be gone a few weeks.”
My fingers found a scratch carved into the surface of the table.
“And?”
“She got worse.”
My thumb stopped moving over the scratch.
Claire continued quietly.
“She died that winter.”
I stared toward the shelves.
Somewhere behind us, a child laughed.
Neither of us spoke for a while.
Then I asked, “Nobody told me?”
“No.”
“But you knew I existed.”
“Yes.”
“You knew who I was when you saw me on Tinder.”
“Yes.”
“So why then?”
Claire looked down at her hands.
“Because I thought I’d finally been given a chance to tell you.”
I waited.
“I didn’t know your last name for years,” she continued. “I knew Ethan. I knew your mom used to pick you up in a red car. I knew you moved not long after Nora got sick. By the time I thought seriously about finding you, I had almost nothing useful.”
“But eventually you did.”
“Seventeen years later, your face showed up on my phone.”
I rubbed both palms against my jeans.
“And you swiped right.”
“Yes.”
“To tell me Nora died. That was the whole plan?”
“One coffee. Tell you who I was. Tell you what happened. Thank you for being her friend.”
I looked at her.
“And then?”
Claire gave a tired little laugh.
“Then you ordered another coffee. You stayed until they started stacking chairs around us.”
“That doesn’t answer why you lied, Claire.”
“No.”
Good.
At least she wasn’t trying to pretend that it did.
