Toby, sensitive to currents, asked mid-afternoon if Mommy and Daddy were having a fight about the lady bag. Elise sat him on the ottoman, eye level, and said, "We are having a grown-up talk about Aunt Natalie and some hard things she asked Daddy to keep private. We are not fighting about loving each other. We are not fighting about loving you. Sometimes adults have to untangle knots, and untangling looks loud."
Toby considered this. "Was Aunt Natalie in trouble?"
Elise glanced at Daniel. Daniel sat on the floor beside them. "Yes," he said. "And she was also brave. And she made mistakes. And she loved you so much she kept a picture of you on her fridge under a magnet shaped like a moose."
Toby's eyes shone. "Can I see the picture?"
"When we get home," Daniel said. "If Grandma still has the fridge photos. I think she does."
That evening Elise took the unlabeled envelope out again and studied Mara's face. Twenty-two in 2019 — so roughly twenty-nine now, with a child of her own. Elise tried to imagine being nineteen, pregnant, terrified of a morality play, choosing strangers in Oregon over the parents who loved her but loved their stories of themselves more. She tried to imagine being Mara, emailing a birth mother in spring and receiving, perhaps, warmth — and then silence when death arrived without an introduction. Did Mara know Natalie had died? The papers did not say.
"We may be about to knock on a door that has already been mourning without us," Elise said.
"Or a door that doesn't want us," Daniel said.