Nate contacted Sophie three weeks after the window.
He had her information. Not from Carol. From the documents he found in the attic at nineteen. The letters between Carol and Helen included an address. The address had changed, but the trail from the original address led, through public records and the particular accessibility of modern search tools, to a woman named Sophie Whitfield living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Nate called her.
Sophie answered.
The conversation lasted eleven minutes. Nate told me afterward that the eleven minutes were the longest and shortest of his life, long because every second contained the weight of thirty years of separation and short because the voice on the other end of the phone sounded like his own, and the similarity was so disorienting that he lost time inside the recognition.
Sophie told Nate she had known about him since she was twelve. Helen told her when she asked why the woman who visited four times a year called herself Mommy and cried every time she left.
