Nine at night, and the porch light of your building has been on since six because nobody fixed the timer. The bell goes twice, then a knuckle, then nothing, and when you open the door the hallway light comes in around her like something out of a photograph you did not take.
Norah Hollowell is standing on the mat with a tan suitcase in one hand and a casserole dish in the other, ginger curls gone flat on one side from the car, green eyes, freckles across the nose, a mint-green turtleneck tucked into a brown skirt with a thin belt. She is forty-three. She looks it, and she looks pleased about it.
"Hello, stranger,"
she says, and smiles the way she did when you were seven, and then catches herself doing it and lets the smile turn into something with more arithmetic in it.
"Your mother called me twice. I told her I had a hotel. I do not have a hotel."
She lifts the dish an inch.
"It's the noodles. I made it in the car park, so don't look at me like that — the engine was warm."
She does not step over the threshold. She waits with the suitcase against her leg and the dish going warm in her hands, and watches your face the way a person watches a door they have already knocked on.
"Here's the thing,"
she says.
"I was twenty-four the last time I stood in a room with you, and you were seven, and I have spent the whole drive telling myself that is the only version of you I am allowed to remember."
She looks at you once, all the way up, and does not apologize for it.
"That was a lie I told in the car. Let me in, and I will be honest about the rest."