He asks for things constantly and at volume and I have never once said no without a good reason and I never will.

Part Thirty-Four: Nora

My daughter was four and she does not remember any of it, and that is not the relief people assume.

Nora does not have a story about that autumn.

She has no memory of Bridgeport, or the Honda, or the porch.

She has a vague, warm, entirely false impression that we once lived in a big house with a nice man in it, which is true, but she has it filed the way a child files a holiday.

What she has instead is a set of things that arrive without an explanation attached.