ONE

New York State

April 2018

Ella stepped through the prison gate, blinded by the sun and the hard blue of the sky, frantically searching the crowd for her mother. At twenty-two, she still felt so, so young, but certainly not the fifteen she had been when she had first arrived here. Freed as if from a box, she stumbled forward but kept her eyes on her feet. If she fell, she knew she wouldn’t be able to get up.

Ella clenched the paper bag containing her belongings—everything except for her old cellphone, which the police said they were keeping indefinitely. She craned her neck and rose on tiptoes, searching past the cameras, the shouts, for her mother.

The air felt buttoned too tight about her throat. Colors vibrated, knocking her off balance. The gaping sky looked as if it might swallow her. What scared her the most were the news vans, the reporters rushing toward her, their voices like thorns. Ella. Ella. Ella, they shouted. Ms. Levy. Ms. Levy. And then Mrs. Levy—that one aimed at her mother, Helen.

Though she was surprised by the media’s presence, their frenzy was nothing new. They had roiled up public opinion against her from the start. The New York Times had blared: QUEENS TEEN PLOTS MURDER OF UPPER EAST SIDE JUDGE. The New York Daily News had been even worse: QUEENS KILLER-CUTIE’S ATTEMPTED MURDER. BOYFRIEND’S DAD FED TOXIC TEA. REDHEAD CAUGHT RED-HANDED.

Back then, after the incident, not a day had gone by that she wasn’t in the papers, that there hadn’t been TV trucks parked on the street at her mother’s home, or reporters hounding her mother, shouting at her, picking at her past to find the juiciest morsels, acting as if Helen were to blame too—because in their view she had been a rule breaker with no morals, a single mother who had been banished from her Hasidic community when as a teen she had gotten pregnant. The media searched through everything, finding pictures of Ella from Help, her high school literary magazine, and from the French club, which she had joined to strengthen her résumé. The papers had published photos from Ella’s Facebook account, along with the messages she had so carefully crafted—especially those she’d put on Jude’s page, including the one she regretted most: I’d do anything for you.

“Ella!” a reporter now shouted. Ella avoided her gaze. “Ella!” someone else cried. “Hey, Red!”

And that was when Ella saw Helen pushing through the crowd, her spine stiff, dressed in heels and a blue business suit, her hair covered by a scarf that also obscured much of her face. “I’m here,” Helen said, and even though it was a warm spring day, she guided Ella into a raincoat with a hood, pulling it over Ella’s face as she led her to the car. Ella tried to ignore the reporters banging on the roof of the coupe. They were acting as if she didn’t deserve to be free at all; and what terrified her more than their pressuring presence was that maybe, just maybe, they were right.

“How do you feel now?” a woman with a microphone shouted. “Has justice been served? What will you do now? Are you going to try to find that boy?”

That boy.

Another reporter jammed his body against the front of the car, shouting and pointing at Helen. “How much did you really know? How could you let all this happen?”

“Will you ever make tea again?” another reporter called.

Helen’s mouth twitched.

“What about a garden?” yet another reporter shouted. “Gonna try to grow more foxglove, are you?”

Helen got in the driver’s seat and locked all the doors, ignoring the slap of hands on the windows, the way fingers left prints, like evidence.

“Bunch of vulturous jerks,” Helen said. “Buckle your seatbelt, please.”

Ella did, trying to make herself as small as possible, burrowing down, and then Helen pressed on the gas and jerked the car forward until the reporters got out of the way. Their shouts continued to bounce against the windows.

“Are you happy now?” a woman called after them.

“Screw the whole lot of you,” Helen muttered.

To Ella’s relief, the media parade didn’t follow them for very long. The whole drive to Brooklyn, Ella stared out the window, stunned at the world. How easily people strolled the sidewalks, the young girls busy living a life that she had missed, all of them ambling in and out of shops or just plunking themselves down on a bench, tilting their faces to the sun and taking this wide-open life for granted. The Free World. That’s what they had called it in prison, but everyone knew you still wouldn’t really be free if you didn’t have the right persona, the right chances.

Did she? Would she?

She didn’t know how she felt about going to live with her mother. Right now she needed her, but Helen’s apartment wasn’t really Ella’s home. Helen had moved twice while Ella was in prison, trying to get away from the media and the threats, first deeper into Queens—from Flushing to Bayside—and then deep in Southwestern Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge, a place Ella had never seen.

“Your whole life’s ahead of you,” Helen said now. “Such a miracle! No probation, no parole. Isn’t that something? A clean slate!”

Ella wasn’t so sure. “I’m still a felon,” she said.

Even after crossing the Hudson, it took them an hour to reach South Brooklyn. The neighborhoods blurred into one another, and they finally arrived in Bay Ridge. (Bay Ridge! Who lived in Bay Ridge?) Maybe she wouldn’t have to be on such high alert here, Ella thought as she cracked open the car window. She might be left alone.

They drove by the Alpine movie theater, specialty grocery markets, and an array of people, mostly teens or families, walking on the scrubby sidewalks. She thought she heard people speaking in Russian, or maybe it was Polish. And then there were bars and lounges with signs advertising happy hour, and just a few doors down, a mosque on one of the corners. She could see the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the bay and the harbor. In prison, she had known every corner of her cell, every pockmark in the prison hallways. But here, she didn’t know what to make of what she saw, or how to feel about it.

“Want some music, honey?” Helen said as she switched on the radio.

Ella had had a radio in prison and mostly listened to the news, but the stories had all sounded as if they were happening on another planet. There had been snipers in Georgia. A school shooting in Indiana. An outbreak of E. coli.

Helen punched a preset and unleashed Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” Ella had danced to that song when they’d told her she was getting out, her cheap commissary radio blasting. Now she didn’t feel like dancing, didn’t feel anything but guilt.

“Want it louder?” Helen asked, and Ella shook her head. The world was too loud for her as it was, which was both wonderful and terrible at the same time. Through her open window, she could smell an exotic mixture of curry, garlic, and something she couldn’t identify but that made her mouth water.

They drove past large homes, with stone facades and slate roofs, and then drove farther down Fifth Avenue, where most of the shops had Arabic signage. The streets were busy with women in hijabs, one of whom had tucked her cellphone between the fabric and her cheek so that she could talk hands-free while she pushed a stroller. There were all these new stores that Ella didn’t recognize. People were talking to one another in English, but when she tried to latch on to a word, it sounded like a foreign language she could no longer speak. How would she ever know what to do, what to wear, or even how to act?

They passed falafel stands and red-sauce pizza joints, and all the smells and noise and color filled Ella with wonder—but then her heart sank when Helen turned down 70th Street and the view morphed into something straight out of that old movie Saturday Night Fever. Ella was swept back to a different time, with Helen on the couch, watching, laughing; a time when they shared experiences. The buildings here were mostly dilapidated three-story multifamily homes, many of them displaying American flags.

As they got closer to her apartment, Helen kept up a cheerful patter about what would come next.

“This won’t be forever. We can sit down together, think of where we can move,” Helen said. “Maybe to the middle of the country? Or what about some small town upstate where we can change our lives? Anywhere but here, right?”

“I can’t think about anything yet,” Ella said. “I’m a little shell-shocked.”

“Of course you are, baby.” Helen patted her hand. “We have all the time in the world.”

Helen slowed by a three-story dirty redbrick building. Three lidless trash bins and a green skateboard kicked upside down graced the tiny patch of lawn.

“Here we are,” she announced. The sidewalk was crumbling and there weren’t many trees, but as soon as she parked, Helen seemed to come alive. She drew Ella into the building, a dark entrance hall with three mailboxes and a rubber-padded stairway. “You get used to the climb,” she said, leading Ella up two flights of stairs, puffing a little when she got to the top. She opened the metal door onto a two-bedroom apartment with carpeted floors the color of a tongue depressor.

Ella immediately felt as if the walls were moving toward her, yet somehow there was too much space, too many things to look at: books tossed on the couch, clothes breeding on chairs, tissue dress patterns puckered with pins on a side table. In prison, Ella had kept her small cell spare so that it would seem larger—or maybe it was just to give herself a sense of control. She had cleaned it obsessively, trying to find some semblance of pride.

She moved to the kitchen and spotted the familiar vintage diner clock, ticking loudly. She had looked at it every day growing up, but now it seemed different, like one of those what’s wrong with this picture games she and Helen used to play. Her hand trailed over every surface. She opened up the cabinets. There were the cups she had painted in grade school, garishly glittery—the ones that Helen said she loved but had insisted were too pretty to use. But the fancy French roast coffee Helen used to buy was gone, jars of instant Nescafé in its place. Helen used to cook, but now the cupboards were stacked with Campbell’s soup and packaged noodles. Other things were either broken or missing, like the chair with deep blue paisley upholstery that Helen had loved.

She roamed toward the back of the apartment, where she saw a small blue bedroom with a big double bed that was surely Helen’s, a patchwork comforter spread across it. She passed another room, probably a second bedroom, but now with shelves full of dress patterns, a long cutting table, and a sewing machine by a window. Through the window, she could see a small backyard, all scrubby grass and an anemic-looking tree.

“I fixed up the bedroom for you,” Helen said.

“What? No! It’s your room—”

“That living room couch pulls out!” Helen said. “And it’s comfortable.” She touched Ella’s face. “I bought new sheets for you, and I sewed the comforter myself. I wanted everything to feel just right for you.” Her mother’s face was so bright, her eyes so sparkling, that all Ella could do was nod. “There are clothes for you too, in the dresser.”

Ella moved to the window and looked out on the street. No one was there, but she could hear the quiet now, as if silence had a deafening sound of its own. And then she heard some kids screaming with laughter, from blocks away, and she thought how amazing it was that they could laugh like that without looking over their shoulders, searching out danger. It was startling to think that they could just live in the world.

“Come, sit down,” Helen called. “I want to show you something.”

Ella stiffened when she saw the computer on the dining room table, an iMac instead of the semi-broken PCs she’d had access to in prison. She’d always had someone standing over her, supervising.

Helen waved as if at a fly. “I use it for designs,” she said. “To see what’s trending out there.”

“Okay,” Ella said.

“This? This is for you,” Helen said, tapping the mouse. A new page opened, showing the special investment account she had started the day Ella was incarcerated. Forty dollars a week taken from her job managing a dress shop in Queens, and now, after all these years, the account had grown to twelve thousand dollars, a small fortune, enough to allow them to start over. Helen had bookmarked sites about different cities: Santa Fe in New Mexico; Gloucester in Massachusetts; small towns in upstate New York, near an actual lake where they could swim, which made Ella think about the Woodstock house that Jude’s family had owned.

“It’ll be a whole new world,” Helen said, but Ella couldn’t stop thinking about the old one. “You check out all those places and see what calls to you,” Helen said. “I can find work most anywhere, and maybe you could, too.”

“Maybe,” Ella said. But what jobs could a felon get, even one with a psychology degree? She could be a cashier at the Thrift-T-Mart. Or she could clean houses.

“You could change your last name to Fitchburg, like I did. It’s just paperwork and going in front of a judge.”

“No,” Ella said. “I can’t do that. No more court. Not ever.”

Helen was quiet for a minute. “You can change your first name, too, if you want. The first step to a fresh start.”

Ella nodded. Maybe Helen was right. Maybe it would help her feel more like a new person, if that could be possible.

Ella clicked off the investment fund site and then powered off the computer.

“I’ll go make dinner,” Helen said. “Is pasta okay?”

While Helen bustled about in the kitchen, calling out that maybe, since Ella was an adult, they should have wine, Ella turned on the computer again. She knew what she had to do, and she had to do it right now before it was too late. She quickly typed in the words: closed adoptions through New York lawyers.

Names of attorneys tumbled onto the screen. But which one had Helen used? Her mouth dried. Her throat felt as if she had swallowed stones.

“Rotini or linguine, honey?” Helen called, and Ella felt her heart skittering so fiercely that she thought she might throw up.

“Linguine is good,” she replied.

Next, she entered her name, and there it was—a multitude of articles about her. The latest news articles were about the journalist who had shown up five years into her sentence. Terrance Grapler. She would never forget him—his checkered shirts with solid ties, his hair just a little too long—or how he had helped her. His series on botched cases had stirred up enough trouble in the district attorney’s office that the governor herself had gotten involved. It had been an election year, and the governor had a vested interest in showing that she supported a project that reopened questionable cases. Sixty percent of all confessions were forced, maybe even more, Grapler had told Ella, plus there were a number of holes in her case. He had also found out that the judge who had sentenced Ella to all those years had been getting kickbacks from the prison for funneling offenders into their cellblocks. Ella had already been condemned by the media, which hadn’t helped. She had been charged with attempted murder, as an adult and not a juvenile, even though she had no prior record. Her lawyer, a friend of a friend of her mother’s, had arrived too late, before he could instruct Ella not to say a word. The cops had told her if she just signed the confession and gave up her right to trial, if she threw herself on the mercy of the Court, she’d get much less time than the maximum twenty-five-year sentence. But she received that sentence anyway. Her lawyer, who had no real criminal experience, did not appeal the decision.

When she was arrested, she had been held in a windowless room for nearly sixteen hours while the police badgered her to confess to the alleged crime. Even the way her Miranda rights were read was twisted, implying it was better for her to talk rather than to stay silent until her attorney arrived. Those had all been breaches in procedure, Grapler had told her.

“Plus,” he said, “Judge Stein had a pacemaker. He had a cardiac condition. The doctors I spoke to said he often didn’t show up for checkups, that he’d constantly reschedule appointments. The foxglove could have exacerbated his condition, but he wasn’t in good health to begin with. He was overweight. He smoked cigars and drank. And yet no one checked his pacemaker for irregularities. Even the toxicology report was contaminated.”

“I don’t understand,” Ella had said.

“I’m not saying that’s the truth or that you’re not guilty,” the journalist said. “That’s not what this is about. But let’s talk about justice. You were railroaded into writing a confession and taking a guilty plea. That’s what I mean.”

And then boom, boom, boom again. Because of the technicalities and the governor’s ire, Ella’s twenty-five-year sentence had been sliced down to the six she had already served. She wouldn’t have to report to a parole or probation officer. But she would still be considered a felon out in the Free World, and if she ever wanted to be exonerated, she’d have to go back to court—and who knew what would happen then or how long it would take. And did she want to go through that? No, she did not.

“Just finishing up, darling,” Helen now called. “Almost ready.”

Here it was, the last part of her search. She couldn’t help herself.

Jude Stein. She typed in his name. And then she thought, What if he’s changed his name, too?

Are you going to try to find that boy? the reporter had shouted, and yes, yes, she was. She had to try to find Jude, whom she had loved and who loved her back. She wanted to ask him why he hadn’t come to see her or even written to her. Why he had abandoned her.

Just tell me what happened—that was what she always wanted to ask. Just tell me so I know, because you were there with me, and whatever you say, I’ll believe.

The lawyers and the cops had told her that Jude wasn’t allowed to see her, that he had given her up, but she had kept trying, had kept asking Helen when she visited if there had been any news, until Helen told her she had to stop.

But she hadn’t been able to. One-sided conversations played out in her mind. Tell me what happened. Tell me where you are. Tell me why.

He had never answered her letters, never signaled her in any way. She couldn’t bear the thought of how he must have blamed her—how he must still blame her—though it couldn’t be more than she blamed herself. She had told herself over and over to move on, like Helen had wanted. She had never had him visit her in a dream or whisper in her mind. Instead, sometimes, lying on her prison cot late at night, she had sworn that she smelled baby powder, that she heard a baby babbling her name, calling her mama.

The prison hadn’t allowed any internet access, but some people had illegal cellphones, and Ella had traded food from the commissary for a half hour on one of them. She had searched Jude’s old screennames: Botaneasy, Bloomwhereplanted, Hey Jude, Jude the Obscure. She searched for all his old accounts: Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr. She also looked at the accounts of mutual friends, just in case they posted a selfie with him. A mention. She hadn’t been able to post anything or to respond to anything. She had only been able to look. And there had been nothing to see.

“Forget him,” the lawyer said.

“You were a kid. He gave you up for attempted murder,” the other inmates would tell her.

No, Ella had said. She believed that couldn’t be right. No, he didn’t give me up. He would never do that to me. We would never ever do that to each other. No matter what.

“Well, he did it. You went to prison, and he went free. And you confessed.”

Let me see him, she kept asking. Let me just talk to him.

“He doesn’t want to talk to you. And you know why.”

Every once in a while, the prison counselor had requested Ella to come see her, and the counselor kept probing. “Do you regret what happened? Do you want to be better, to have a better life?”

“I don’t remember!” she had cried. “How can I atone if I don’t remember?”

“You remember some of it,” the counselor had assured her. “You confessed. And now you need to process it.”

“What if you hypnotize me?” Ella had asked, but the counselor had told her that wouldn’t be admissible evidence, because the mind is as malleable as clay and everyone knows you could tell someone in hypnosis that they are a chicken, and they’d believe it and start flapping their arms like wings.

Remember, remember, the counselor had kept telling her.

I would if I could.

Now Ella heard Helen humming, the way she used to when she cooked. She heard the water running, the fridge door opening and closing, and garlic sputtering in a pan.

She had more time to explore.

But Helen came into the room too quickly, holding up two candlesticks, taking Ella by surprise. “I thought candles would be nice,” Helen said. “You must be starving.” And then she peered at the screen and grew still.

“What are you doing?” Helen said carefully, setting down the candlesticks. When Ella didn’t answer, Helen reached over her and clicked off the computer. “You’re being dangerously foolish. They could throw you back in prison.”

“For what?” Ella said.

“For anything they want.” Helen put her hand lightly on Ella’s shoulder. “You know what they said. You cannot go near that boy again. Not after what happened.” She took her hand away, and Ella yearned for its warmth again. “You can’t possibly still love him—”

“I don’t,” Ella insisted. As soon as she said it, though, she felt overwhelmed by the past, how giant her love had been, how it had swallowed her whole and then dimmed—but it had never really gone away. “I just want to know where he is,” she said.

“Why? For what?”

“I just want to know,” Ella said.

Helen sighed heavily. “You know, honey,” she said slowly, “it’s been really hard for me, too.” She stroked Ella’s hair. “Come on, let’s eat something delicious.”

Ella couldn’t imagine eating anything, but she switched seats from the computer chair to a place in front of the flickering candles. Helen brought out pasta aglio e olio on a platter, and a salad of field greens tossed with chopped pears and walnuts. A celebration dinner.

That night, alone in her mother’s bed, the door as wide open as Ella could get it, she couldn’t rest. She sat up and looked out her window. The room faced the sidewalk, but the street was dark and empty. She shuffled to the living room, where Helen was on the couch, reading. She met Helen’s eyes and then snuggled on the couch beside her. Eventually her eyes drooped shut, and she finally felt safe enough to sleep.

THE NEXT DAY was Saturday, and though Helen was happy (“We have all this time together!”), Ella just wanted her mother out of the house so that she could freely search the internet.

She tried to get time alone. She asked her mother to buy her eight skeins of blue worsted wool and size eight bamboo needles so that she could make a sweater. The prison had offered supervised knitting classes, believing that small motor skills would reduce anxiety, and that it could offer the women a sense of accomplishment. The whole time Ella had been in prison, no one had even thought of using the circular needles as a weapon—but the instructor kept a close count of the needles anyway. Ella had thought she could never do anything remotely crafty, that her mother was the creative one, but she had gone to the class because it had broken up the day, and she could get lost in the sound of the clicking needles. Plus, she had loved the feel of the yarn running through her hands. The yarn in prison had been cheap and all the same color, an odd synthetic green, but after she had made a garter stitch scarf which she shyly gave to Helen during a visit, Helen had begun to bring her more and better yarn—linen, cotton, soft wool—and special bamboo needles with a silky feel to them. Ella had become so fond of knitting that it began to feel like a drug that helped her forget where she was and why.

But today Helen shopped faster than Ella expected. She was home before Ella could really make any progress in her search.

The next day she asked for a box of brown hair color, and again Helen came home too quickly, with a box of color called Lush Chestnut and a new cellphone for Ella with an unlisted number.

“So you can always reach me,” Helen said, and Ella threw herself into her mother’s arms. There it was, another tool of the Free World.

She took the hair dye into their bathroom and, using Helen’s sewing scissors, chopped her orange curls to her chin, then painted on the new color. Forty minutes later, she washed it out. In the mirror, she saw a different person. Reborn a brunette, she thought. All those names the media had called her—Red Hot, Red-Handed—wouldn’t fit her anymore. Her newly dark, cropped hair made her blue eyes look enormous, as if she could see everything she had missed before.

“I don’t think I can get used to this,” Helen said, staring at Ella’s new hair.

“You will,” Ella said, even though she wasn’t so sure herself.

All that afternoon, Ella played with her new phone, roaming the different sites, playing games while Helen floated around her, making it impossible for Ella to concentrate. Surely Helen’s phone would ring, or the intercom would buzz, but things remained quiet. Ella had noticed while growing up that Helen never really had friends because she was always with Ella or at work, but now Ella wondered why her mother hadn’t made any new friends all these years, why she hadn’t seemed to try.

But Ella knew why. It was all her fault.

She felt her mother watching her, smothering her like a heavy coat she couldn’t manage to shake off. When Ella walked into another room, Helen followed. When Ella was in the shower, Helen knocked on the bathroom door and asked, “Everything all right?”

That night, Ella heard Helen quietly glide into the bedroom, then stand there, staring at her. Ella froze, pretending to be asleep until Helen crept away.

THEY SPENT ALL day together on Sunday, shopping for summer clothes and sandals. When a pedestrian accidentally bumped into Ella, she stopped, tense, the way she would have in prison, but Helen took her arm. “It’s nothing,” Helen said quietly. There was too much noise now, Ella thought, too many strangers glancing at her, and when Helen suggested going to eat Chinese food Ella asked if they could take the food home.

“Of course, darling,” Helen said.

Finally, it was Monday morning, Ella’s first day all on her own. Helen was going to work at the dress shop in Bay Ridge, where she would do tailoring and some dressmaking.

“Stay inside. You can read! Or watch TV,” Helen told her. “There might not be any more stories about you now, but still, I wouldn’t go near the news channels, especially anything local.” She put a hand on Ella’s shoulder. “Protect yourself, honey,” she said.

“What about you?” Ella said. “Are they going to ask you questions about me at your job?” she asked, and Helen waved a hand.

“Don’t be silly. They love me there,” she said. “I work in a backroom, and they won’t let the media near me. Anyway, I know how to handle them. And don’t you answer the door or the phone unless you know it’s me.” Helen leaned over and gave Ella a kiss. “It’s still you and me against the world, honey.”

As soon as Ella heard the front door close, she went to the window facing the street and opened it, letting in the air, the sounds. Below, two guys were arguing, gesturing angrily. A young mother walked by, holding a little boy’s hand and swinging it as he sang a nonsensical song. Ella watched as the young woman bent and kissed the boy’s head.

Her stomach twisted with grief.

Closing the window, she approached the table and turned on the computer, which somehow seemed easier to operate than her phone. She began to snoop again: local adoption lawyers. There were so many names, how would she know which one Helen had gone to? She wondered too if an adoption lawyer would even talk with her, a felon. She felt something wrench in her throat.

Maybe this wasn’t the best way to do things. She knew Helen was a packrat, so maybe she had saved something. A bill. A business card. Ella searched the entire apartment, probing the bottom of a closet that had cards from Ella’s first birthday, and another closet with files filled with old income tax returns and payment documents. She had to ferret through until she found a confirmation letter from the adoption attorney, and then, heart thumping, a name and address: Aileen Santiago, 145 West 34th Street, Suite 710.

SIX YEARS AGO, she had lost everything. Jude. Her freedom. Her future. And her baby. Everyone at the prison had urged her toward adoption. “You cannot raise a baby in here,” the warden said. “You can’t live from visit to visit.”

Ella stubbornly resisted, but even Helen pushed and pleaded with her to give up her child.

“Think of your life,” Helen urged. “By the time your sentence is served, that baby will be a woman. What do you think will happen when you get out, and she has her own life, her own apartment?” Had she wanted to be a single mother to a daughter she would be able to see only on visits, traumatizing them both? Had she wanted to bathe her own daughter in shame? Better to be invisible, Helen insisted. “Please,” she said quietly. “Consider adoption.”

Ella cried then, and Helen held her hands tighter.

At the prison, Ella had watched people leave the visiting area as if they couldn’t wait to get out of there, couldn’t wait to go back to their real lives. The few children she had seen had looked shy and crumpled. Maybe Helen was right, but maybe she wasn’t.

“No,” Ella said. “I won’t consider it.”

“I can’t take care of your child for you. I can’t do it on my own. And I don’t want you to have the same struggles that I did. Plus I have to work, every day. I can’t afford to take care of a child.”

“You won’t have to,” Ella insisted, because even then, she kept holding out hope that Jude would finally come find her, that he’d call, send a letter. They’d always talked about starting a family together and she knew that—no matter what—he’d never do this to her, to their child.

Helen cleared her throat. “Jude signed papers relinquishing any claim to the baby.”

“What? That’s not true. When?” Ella said, panicking. “When did you hear from him? Why didn’t he contact me?”

“I was told,” Helen said. “I thought you knew. I didn’t want to upset you by bringing it up.”

Ella stared at her, astonished.

“You know, we got lucky. The media doesn’t know you’re pregnant. Now we can keep it quiet.”

“What are you even saying?”

“You didn’t get to have a father,” Helen said. “Do you want that for your child? Shouldn’t she get to have two parents who love her? Maybe a beautiful home and money, too? Opportunities?” She pressed closer. “Shouldn’t she have that? And shouldn’t you?”

Ella felt the world, the life she had dreamed of, slipping away. “Yes,” she finally said quietly.

Helen, against prison rules, swept Ella into her arms. “Darling,” she said, “I swear this is the right choice—the only choice—for us to make.”

Us? If there was an us, then why did she feel so alone, so abandoned?

“No one will ever have to know,” Helen said.

And she was right, because while the media seemed to have dug up every ugly thing about Ella that ever existed, no one mentioned her pregnancy.

IT WAS DIFFERENT now. Ella’s daughter would only be six—not twenty-five. They could still have a life together. The yearning Ella felt was so intense, it doubled her over. She believed that this was a real way to right some of the wrong, to grab some connection. Maybe the only way she had.

IT TOOK ELLA four days to gather her courage and call the lawyer, making an appointment, asking for a free consult, just fifteen minutes. Helen would be at work. She wouldn’t have to know.

On the following Monday, Ella gathered all the lunch money that her mother had been leaving her—money that was always left over because she had no appetite and usually just foraged snacks from the fridge. She was eager to get out, though she wasn’t sure how to face the Free World on her own. Today, though, determined, she went outside and headed to the subway station. She got the first train that came, the R local, huddling in her seat, trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible, all the way up to 34th Street—Herald Square.

Emerging into the pulse of midtown Manhattan, Ella was terrified. Every sound made her skitter on the sidewalk. The air had a kind of fierce energy. When a woman bumped into her, Ella flinched, sure she had been found out, or that the woman would yell at her for getting in her way. Instead, the woman smiled at her and apologized.

The law office was in a uniform midtown skyscraper, close to the hubbub of Broadway. Ella felt too young, too nervous to be out on her own like this. She had borrowed a dark blue skirt suit from Helen’s closet and slid her feet into a pair of Helen’s heels. She had smoothed her wild hair as best she could, using some hair spray she found in the bathroom, but all she had to do was look at other girls on the street to know that she stood out, that she looked like a kid playing dress-up.

When she got off the elevator on the seventh floor, she immediately saw a pair of big glass doors etched with the attorney’s name, a young receptionist staffing a desk behind them. As soon as Ella walked in, the receptionist looked up. “Hello. And you are?” she said, and when Ella told her, she told her to take a seat.

Ella had barely settled into the buttery leather couch when a blond woman with a wolf’s face came toward her.

“I’m Aileen Santiago,” the woman said, shaking Ella’s hand.

Ella followed her into an office, then carefully perched on an upholstered chair while Aileen sat behind a steel desk that had nothing on it but a computer and a box of tissues. “Go ahead, tell me,” she said, and then Ella stammered out her story.

“Your mother had a point,” Aileen Santiago said when Ella had finished. “Did you want to raise a baby in prison? A child who would eventually know what you had done?”

Ella flinched. What she had done.

“I didn’t know what I wanted,” Ella said. “Everyone kept telling me to think of myself. To try to move on. To do it quickly so the media wouldn’t find out. They kept telling me that the baby would never look for me and even if she did, she might not be happy with what she found. She might consider my life an unhappy story she would never want to tell. They told me the greatest kindness was for me to free her. What was I supposed to believe?”

“But you did give her up. You signed the papers. Why?”

Ella tried to swallow the lump in her throat. “My mother urged me to do it. She said it was best. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—raise another child on her own.”

“And she was right. And you made the choice.” Aileen turned to her computer, positioning the monitor so that Ella couldn’t see. “And the father signed relinquishment papers, too.”

Ella’s mouth trembled. For the first time, Ella saw a flash of sympathy in Aileen Santiago’s eyes. It softened Ella, made her remember how for months after her baby was gone, she had kept her hands on her stomach, as if trying to feel for something that wasn’t there anymore.

But now, impossibly, it didn’t seem such a fantasy.

“Why have you changed your mind?”

“Because I made a mistake. Because I never knew I was going to get out so soon. Because I just want to see if there is anything I can do to fix it, to get my child back.”

Aileen shook her head. “You know there isn’t.”

“I just want to know if she’s okay, know who has her—”

“I can’t give you any information about the adoptive parents.” Aileen leaned toward Ella. “It was a closed adoption. What is it you want to do here?”

“Why did you let me come here if you weren’t going to help me? Why didn’t you just tell me when I called to make the appointment?”

“My receptionist booked this as a consult. I couldn’t have known what you wanted until you told me. And I don’t give legal advice over the phone to people who are not my clients.” Aileen sat still. Ella looked past her and saw photos lining a shelf against the wall. In one, Aileen held two babies on her lap, smiling happily. There was a beach photo of children playing, of a man who looked overwhelmed with joy. When she saw Ella staring past her, Aileen sighed. “My husband and I adopted our children from China,” she said.

“You adopted kids,” Ella said quietly, looking at the photos. “Was it hard? Did you ever wonder about their birth mother?”

“We’re not talking about me,” Aileen said.

“You never wondered about their mothers?”

Aileen bristled. “I did. And I sympathized. But many female children in China were being abandoned because of the one-child rule. Or because of poverty. My children needed homes, just like yours did.”

Aileen shifted in her chair. “You did the best thing, giving up your rights to that baby. And the father did the right thing, too. So why are you here?”

Ella swallowed hard and began to cry. “Maybe I want her back.”

“Maybe?” the lawyer said quietly. She pushed the box of tissues toward Ella, who grabbed two and held them to her eyes. “No one is going to give that child back to you. Not now, not ever. You understand that, right? You may be out of prison, but you’re still a felon. And your daughter’s been with another family for years. You have a new lease on life, and you should count your blessings. Let that child continue to have her own.”

“Don’t I have the right to even see her? To know her? To make sure she’s happy?”

“You don’t have the right to disrupt someone’s life, hers or her parents’. You don’t even know what she’s been told. She might not know she’s adopted.” Aileen sighed again. “When that child reaches eighteen, if she wants, she can find you.”

“Oh my God,” Ella said, grabbing more tissues. She looked up. “May I have some water?”

Aileen glanced at her watch and then stood up. “I’ll get you some water and then I’m afraid I have another appointment.”

The lawyer walked out of the room, closing the door behind her, and Ella froze. Her daughter was now someone else’s. She wanted to barge in and take her back and figure out the rest later—how to support her, where to live. Maybe Aileen was right, but what killed her was that she might never see her child again.

She drew herself up, anxiety flaring. Every time she heard footsteps, she tensed, worrying it might be Aileen with the cops, ready to strong-arm her back to prison for any reason they chose.

Ella jumped from the chair. She went to the attorney’s computer and clicked on History, and there it was, her name on a file that the lawyer must have checked before their appointment. She clicked on it, and there was the information about her. And there was this, too: Infant girl. Ann Arbor. Mark and Marianna Shorter. An address and a phone number. She guessed people could adopt from different states, because here it was. Or maybe they had just wanted to make it harder for her to reach her baby. She knew these people could have moved, but it was something, a start. Put it behind you, the lawyer had said, but Ella knew she couldn’t. She knew if she didn’t go see her daughter now, she would die from longing.

She grabbed a pen from the desk and scribbled the info on the inside of her hand. She heard footsteps and quickly clicked off the history. Heart pounding, she headed for the door, almost crashing into Aileen.

“I changed my mind,” Ella blurted. “I’m not thirsty.” Then she fled, her fingers closed over her prize.

THAT EVENING, WHEN Helen got home, Ella told her, “I know where I want to live. Ann Arbor, Michigan.”

“I never thought of Ann Arbor,” Helen said. Ella couldn’t tell her that she hadn’t thought of her mother there with her, either; that she saw only herself there, alone, finally being an adult. And finally free.

When Helen asked her why she had chosen Ann Arbor, Ella said it was because it was a college town. “It’s supposed to be magical there,” she said, though all she really knew about it was that it was far away from Brooklyn.

“What will you do there?” Helen said.

Ella knew it wasn’t going to be easy finding a job. She had gotten her psychology degree in prison as part of an innovative program from Bard College, but she wasn’t sure what she could do with it. She had even taken classes on how to present herself to a potential employer, how to dress, how to speak. But in prison, it didn’t matter if you made mistakes. Now it would.

“Apply to everything,” the women in prison had been told. “You never know what a job you think you don’t even like can lead to. And some jobs may look the other way on a background check.”

Ella promised herself she would try, but she still needed time to heal.

ONE MONTH PASSED, and then another. Helen kept her promise and helped Ella change her last name to Fitchburg, even going with her to stand in front of the judge to get it done. “My brand-new girl!” Helen had said, and Ella felt she just might be. By then she could sleep alone in Helen’s bedroom, with the door closed. She swore she felt herself getting stronger—older too, in a way. Red roots began to thread into the brown, her curls growing longer, more unruly. Helen offered to take her to a hair salon, but Ella shook her head. She didn’t want anyone controlling any part of her in the way they had in prison. For her, that included letting someone else try to tame her curls.

Journalists somehow found their unlisted numbers, so Helen changed them again. Ella knit while she looked online for jobs. She read articles on her phone about what it was like to work a job, how you had to create a separate, professional self. There were also articles from women who wrote that they had been wrongly fired, or hit on by their bosses. One of them had sued her boss in court—and won.

No court. No lawyers. Never again.

“What’s it like to work?” Ella asked Helen that evening.

“I can take you with me one day, if you like—”

Ella shook her head. “I don’t want to make things hard for you. Anyway, I’d rather you tell me.”

And so Helen did, telling her how every morning she would remind herself that she could do this. How she had to pay attention to everything around her, how she had to learn to read how people were feeling.

“But most of all,” she said, “you have to believe in yourself.” Hearing that, Ella bit back tears, because how could she do that?

She also knew that being told about an experience was not the same as having it. Ella might be frightened of not having Helen around to protect her, but she was more frightened of not being able to protect herself, of not knowing how to be a grownup in the outside world.

The next day, Ella donned a baseball cap and took the R train back into the city. Be brave, she told herself, but the hordes of people crowding past her overwhelmed her. A man with a tree branch strapped to his back waved at her, shouting, and she cringed away from him.

She wandered in and out of stores, daring herself to respond when a clerk asked, “Can I help you?” Finally, she began to relax and headed for a tall, silver office building on Broadway. It felt instantly different when she went inside, and her fear stepped back up. Everyone looked so polished, so sure of themselves, dressed in suits or silky-looking shirts, so well groomed that Ella pulled her hat over her hair a bit more. She tried to make herself a shadow. Two men were standing by the outer door, both studying a folder.

“I still think we can push that percentage,” one of the men insisted.

“Let’s put a pin in it and talk at lunch with Claire,” said the other man. Then a woman in a dark suit, her glossy hair pinned back, rushed toward them.

“The client was late again!” she said. “But I’m here now. What’s going on with these files?”

“We’ll talk at lunch,” one of the men said, opening the front door. Then he said something else that Ella couldn’t hear, and the woman threw back her head and laughed, as if they were friends, too, and not just coworkers.

Ella walked deeper inside, closer to an elevator bank, and stood next to a woman, young like Ella, who was reading from a sheet of paper and biting her lip. If this woman could do it, maybe Ella could too. “Rough day?” Ella forced herself to say. She wanted to flee immediately, but the woman looked at her and brightened.

“Oh my God,” the woman said. “You know how it is. They want everything yesterday.”

“The day before yesterday,” Ella blurted, and the woman’s smile grew. “Take the time you need,” she continued, parroting what Helen had told her about finding a job.

This time, the woman touched Ella’s shoulder, and she felt a small electric shock at the contact. “I wish you were my boss,” the woman said, and then the elevator came and she got on.

Ella, however, turned away, not wanting to extend the interaction. “Oh, I forgot something!” she said. The woman in the elevator waved goodbye and Ella waved back.

The elevator left and Ella laughed. Maybe she could do this after all. She could keep practicing until it felt more familiar to her.

She made her way over to Eighth Avenue and down to the Village, feeling the neighborhoods change as she got farther downtown. Manhattan had always seemed to her like a kind of house with different rooms. While Jude’s Upper East Side had seemed like an expensive living room where you had to be careful not to touch anything lest you break it, Hell’s Kitchen was more like a motley den, where there were wildly competing food smells and louder voices. The West Village felt like your best friend’s furnished basement, where you could smoke weed and listen to music and talk about everything and no one would give you funny looks.

On 14th Street, she stopped at the Good Hearts Thrift Store, filled more with hipsters than people who looked like they really needed to shop there. She browsed the ten-dollar suits, because she planned to dress the part—if she ever landed an interview. She stopped when she found a black jacket and skirt—because black was New York cool, or at least it used to be—and a pale peach blouse to go under it. She also snagged a pair of five-dollar black pumps that weren’t too scuffed and a small purse that looked professional. Look like you mean business, they had told her in prison. Shoulders back. Keep your head and chin and hopes up.

Ella bought the clothes, holding the bag close against her chest all the way home.

THAT EVENING, SHE told her astonished mother what she had done. She even modeled the outfit for Helen.

“Ta-da!” she said, but Helen looked as if she would cry. “What, Mom?”

Helen swiped at her eyes. “I could have gone with you,” she said.

Ella shook her head. “I had to do it on my own.”

“I could have made you something brand new. You didn’t have to buy clothes.”

“You still can,” Ella said. “I’ll need other clothes for work, won’t I?” And then Helen seemed to practically glow.

ELLA SCOURED LINKEDIN and Glassdoor for jobs in Ann Arbor. There were job openings for school helpers, for clerks in various shops, and for orderlies at an assisted living facility, but when Ella saw the check box on the application forms about being a felon, she began to feel desperate.

By the end of July, she was beginning to worry that she would never find anything. She hadn’t even gotten an interview yet. “It’s okay,” Helen said kindly. “You will. And there’s no need to rush.” But then, as if by another miracle, she found a job that asked for a writing sample before an application, a job writing an advice column for a new Ann Arbor newspaper called the Grapevine Arbor. It paid five hundred dollars a week, something she could live on if she was careful. She could rent a room. Or a tiny studio in a bad part of town. She’d live on peanut butter and saltines. The paper wanted to use a fake name, a fake photograph, and that suited Ella just fine.

At first she didn’t tell Helen about applying for the newspaper job. She didn’t want Helen’s help, because she knew her mother’s hovering would just make her more unsure, more frightened. Instead, she worked on the sample letter prompt that the owner, a woman named Pearl, sent her: My partner gives me the silent treatment. What do I do?

In prison, the women would withdraw into themselves when they had been deeply hurt, such as when a partner hadn’t come for visiting days three weeks in a row; when a prison friend had been released and they had to stay; when there had been a loss of friendship, of company, maybe of hope. It wasn’t that the women hadn’t wanted to talk. Rather, they couldn’t, just for self-preservation. They had to keep still so they wouldn’t break. They had to honor their boundaries.

Ella reread the prompt five times, considering. Then she wrote about how people who feel they have no power sometimes mistakenly think that there’s control in silence, in denying others their voice, when in fact, the real solution is to talk, to communicate, even if all you can do is sit beside someone and hold their hand.

Ella sucked in a breath. She attached her reply to the email, hit Send, and put her hands over her face. Please. Oh please.

Pearl emailed back almost immediately, wanting Ella’s cell, relaying her own, and asking Ella to call her. Ella waited until Helen was at work to make the call. Then she sat with her phone in her hand, trembling. She did some deep breathing to calm her voice, and when that didn’t work, she put on the suit, the shoes. There, she thought. There I am. A little bit more brand new.

When she called, to her shock, Pearl’s voice was bouncy with enthusiasm. “I love what you wrote!” Pearl said, “Let’s you and I have a talk next week. It’s important to me that I hire someone I feel simpatico with. And in the meantime, I’d like to give you two more assignments to see how you might do with our tougher questions. Short, pithy answers, please. We don’t have a lot of space.”

“Of course,” Ella said, and then she hung up the phone and cried.

The assignments came that evening, two different letters, one from a reader who bluntly asked why the fuck a columnist could answer questions that he himself could not. Ella could tackle that one. She knew from prison that sometimes you were just so deep in a problem, you couldn’t find a way out; that sometimes it didn’t even matter if another person could give you an answer, because just the pure act of talking—and of listening—could open a door.

She was happy with that answer, but the next question made her want to give up.

I adore my older brother, but he was sent to juvie two years ago for arson. After he came home, there was a fire in his neighborhood and I think he did it. But when I asked him, he threatened to hurt me if I told anyone. He said I’d better have proof if I’m going to accuse him like that. He says he can’t go back to prison. What do I do?

Signed, Hopelessly Devoted

Dear Hopelessly Devoted,

I don’t question that you love your brother, or that you want the best for him. But right now, you have no proof that he caused that fire. His saying that he cannot go back to juvie doesn’t mean he’s guilty, but it does sound like he’s afraid, and that fear generated an immediate reaction.

Now let’s talk about the other issue, his threatening to hurt you. Has he ever done this before to you or anyone else? Is this the brother you adore talking or is it his fear? You didn’t mention how old you are or where your parents are in this, but you might want to talk with them if they’re around.

Try to stay calm. Stay loving. Listen to your brother and be present for him. Don’t assume he’s guilty; the world already does. That’s how we tend to see the formerly incarcerated. Don’t let your own fear and anxiety change your relationship with him in the absence of evidence. It’s up to you to be the person who upholds the great ideal: innocent until proven guilty.

Ella didn’t know if that was a decent answer, but it was one that felt right to her, especially with how confusing guilt and innocence really were. She sent the responses off, and two days later Pearl called her.

At first, they just talked. Pearl asked her what advice columns she read, if any, and what books she liked. She asked how she might react to being called bad names, which made her laugh, because wasn’t that what prison was all about most of the time?

“I have an iron skin,” Ella said.

Pearl steered the conversation around to herself, talking about painting her house, every room a different color, about how cold Ann Arbor winters are. “You’ll need a really warm coat,” Pearl told her.

“I love the cold,” Ella lied, a warm, hopeful light building in her stomach. “The more hats and scarves, the better.”

“Ha, you say that now,” Pearl laughed, and then she cleared her throat. “Well, you know, the other applicants have much more experience than you do—though some, of course, aren’t crazy about the salary—”

“The salary is fine—”

“But I like talking with you,” Pearl continued, “and that’s important. And I like how fast you are. Do you know some of the applicants haven’t even turned in their first assignment yet? That just won’t do. And I like your answers, which manage to be honest and yet compassionate. And short, too. Like I asked for.”

Ella’s heart beat faster.

“Let me think about it,” Pearl said. “I’ll call you in a week. We have a small office on the university campus, but you can work from home if that’s okay.”

“I’ll start knitting my mittens,” Ella said. She felt like an idiot for saying that, but Pearl laughed.

IN THE FIRST week of August, Pearl offered Ella the job. “You can start the second week of September,” she said. “Give yourself time to move and settle in, and give HR time to process all the paperwork.”

As soon as Ella hung up, she sat there, unable to move, her breath quickening.

But when the Grapevine Arbor emailed her the employment forms five minutes later, wanting her to sign, scan and send them back, there it was, glaring up at her, the box you had to check if you were a felon. Ella’s stomach roiled. If she checked yes, she wouldn’t get the job. She wouldn’t get to see her daughter. What if she didn’t check it? What if she could lie and say she hadn’t seen the check box? She could make it vanish, just like she was trying to forget her prison sentence. What if she made herself so invaluable that by the time they found out—if they ever found out—it wouldn’t matter?

She filled in B.A. Psychology. They didn’t have to know it was a prison program. It was still a degree and from an accredited institution, something to be proud of, not defensive about. Then she checked the box that read, No, not a felon. One truth and a lie.

She was sweating now, but she filled out the rest of the form, scanned it, and then hit Send before she could change her mind.

“WILL I LIKE Ann Arbor?” Helen asked that night. “I imagine there’ll always be work for a good dressmaker.”

Her face was open and hopeful, her eyes bright. Ella could see her mother scanning the apartment as if she were deciding what to take and what to leave behind, and how exciting that would all be. Ella felt a whip of sorrow, or maybe it was guilt, because didn’t Helen deserve more, too, than to be left behind again? Hadn’t Helen given up so much for her?

“Mom,” Ella said, “I need to go out there on my own.”

Helen froze. “What?” She reached behind her for a chair and sat down. “I just got you back, after all these years. I just got you back and you want to leave me?”

“I need to see what it’s like to be on my own, to see if I can make it.” Ella heard the tremor in her voice. Her mother looked so sad and small that Ella wanted to fling herself into her mother’s lap and apologize, but instead she steeled herself.

Helen rubbed her forehead and blinked hard. “All these years…,” she said.

“You know you’ll always be welcome in my home.”

“Your home,” Helen repeated quietly. She ran a hand under her eyes. “I thought this was your home. I thought wherever we were together was home.”

“You can visit. I want you to visit,” Ella said. “Please, Mom. I need to do this. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you or need you. And the job doesn’t start until September, so I’ll still be here for a while. I just wanted to tell you.” Ella bit her lower lip. “So you can share my excitement.”

Helen looked at Ella. “Of course, baby,” she said quickly. “You’re an adult now. It’s probably right that you should at least see what it’s like to be on your own.”

“I’m still going to have you visit,” Ella said. “It’s not like I’m cutting you off here.”

“Well, then,” Helen said. “I can’t wait to visit.”

“Maybe you’ll be relieved when I’m gone,” Ella said. “You can have your life back!”

“Oh yes,” Helen said. But she didn’t look at Ella when she said it.

That night, when the lights were out and Ella was trying to sleep, she heard her mother crying. She lifted herself up. She could go to her. She could tell her the truth about her fear. She could say that she’d stay longer, and then Helen would relax. Helen would wrap her arms around her, holding her just a little too tight, a little too long.

Instead, Ella settled back down in the bed, her eyes wide open until Helen’s crying stopped.

HELEN HELPED ELLA find an Ann Arbor apartment online that she could afford, just two low-ceilinged rooms in a shabby two-story duplex. She would have the top floor, and her own private entrance at the top of a staircase on the side. Helen offered to help with the rent. “Your first apartment,” she said, but her voice was tinged with sorrow.

Ella had been among adult women in prison, women who’d told her about their home lives, about paying bills, managing kids. But these had just been stories to Ella. She hadn’t lived any of that herself.

Helen showed Ella how to set up a budget, but Ella was already looking for ways to conserve, to make the most of what she had. When Helen gave her money to buy their weekly groceries, Ella compared the prices of things, always going for the least expensive brand. She used to love to buy paperback novels when she was in high school, to own them, but now she began to use the library because books felt expensive, like an indulgence. And then, amid the lingering fear, a new feeling began to take hold: pride.

ONE DAY, HELEN came home with a second car, a creamy yellow beater with red upholstery.

“You bought another car?” Ella asked.

“It’s used,” Helen said. “Very used. But it runs. And it’s for you because it’s best to learn on a car you’re going to be using. You need to learn how to drive. You can’t go to a place without a subway system and not know how.”

Ella blinked at the car. She slid into the driver’s seat, her hands shaking. Helen buckled herself into the passenger’s seat and put her hand on top of Ella’s. “Don’t be nervous,” she said. “You’ve got this. Step on the gas and turn right.”

Ella practiced driving for the month of August, until she began to feel like she was part of the car, that it could reliably do what she asked it to. The day she passed her driving test, she drove through the entire city—Ella steering confidently, Helen blinking back her sorrow. Ella drove carefully through the thickets of families strolling in Park Slope, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and into Manhattan. She drove up the east side, from the East Village through Murray Hill, then Turtle Bay, and up to the Upper East Side where Jude had lived. When they passed his home, Helen looked away.

“You can relax a little,” she said gently, tapping Ella’s knuckles on the wheel. But Ella had to make sure she was taking in everything—the crooked tree on the corner, the red door on a brownstone—because this might be the last time she would ever see it.

FINALLY, ON A freakishly hot September day, Ella and Helen stood out on the street in front of Ella’s packed car.

Helen’s mouth wobbled. “I could squeeze in the trunk,” she said.

The heat was coming in waves. The car didn’t have an air conditioner, so Ella had all the windows open. She had gone into prison a teenager, and here she was now, something else—not exactly an adult, but maybe on her way to being one. She reached for Helen, wanting to rest her head against her mother’s shoulder one more time, to inhale the lemony scent of her mother’s shampoo. But Helen stepped back, her hands flying up, her eyes watering.

“You can do anything now. Be anything you want,” Helen said quietly.

“You helped me.”

“You helped yourself, honey.”

“Mom,” Ella said. “You have to let me hug you.”

“I don’t like goodbyes,” Helen said. “I just want us to say, ‘See you soon.’” Her hands were shaking, and for the first time, Ella noticed the blue veins in her mother’s hands, the dry, wispy edges of her hair. She’ll still be here. Any time I want to come back.

“See you soon,” Ella said quietly.

“I’m going inside so I don’t have to watch you go.” Then Helen lurched toward Ella, holding her tight, breathing against her neck.

“Call me every day. Be safe. Be happy,” she whispered. “That’s what I want for you.” Helen let go first.

“That’s what I want for you, too,” Ella said.

“My Ella.”

“Mom—” Ella said again. For the first time she realized that she wouldn’t see her mother every morning, and a bloom of panic rose in her throat. “I’m going to miss you.”

“Don’t you know that I’m always with you?” Helen said quietly. “Wherever you are. Wherever you go. I’m there.”

Helen tapped Ella’s heart and then her own. “Us against the world, remember?” she said, her smile wobbling again. “Always was, always will be. Check the glove compartment.” Then she turned and walked back into the apartment.

Ella got in the car and drove. She didn’t check the glove compartment until she was out of New York State, at a rest stop parking lot, so sweaty that her shirt was sticking to the upholstery. She snapped the glove box open. There it was, a white envelope, probably a letter full of advice Ella would never consider taking—but when she ripped it open, a check fluttered out. She stared at it. It was for the money Helen had saved while Ella was in prison. Ella hadn’t even thought to ask for it, because she knew that Helen could use that money. She felt like a thief—stealing from her mother, on top of the crime of leaving her behind.