Why Am I here?

She sprang up immediately and hurried toward the gate, peering into the darkness to see who it might be. Perhaps a farmer nearby was coming, she thought hopefully. As the vehicle drew closer, she lifted her phone and began waving the small torch frantically in the air, trying to catch the driver’s attention.

Then she hesitated. The realization of how exposed she was struck her suddenly. Alone, soaked, standing by a deserted country road in the middle of the night. Stories about women getting hurt after asking strangers for help drifted uneasily through her mind.

The vehicle seemed to approach painfully slowly, though in reality it could not have taken more than a couple of minutes. Bright headlights suddenly washed over the road, overpowering the weak glow from her phone.

A large off-road vehicle with heavy tyres rolled past before Nora even had time to react. For a terrible second, her stomach dropped. She thought the driver had missed her entirely. Then the sharp squeal of brakes cut through the quiet as the car disappeared briefly beyond a bend. Moments later, it began reversing, the headlights sliding back along the road until the vehicle stopped beside where she stood.

The window slid down.

A deep male voice drifted out into the rainy night, sounding suspicious, though there was a trace of dry humor in it.

“What the actual hell do you think you are doing out here looking like that?”

If someone had told her six weeks earlier she would be standing in this very spot, she’d not have believed it.

Nora then was in a very different kind of room.

She stared blankly as she watched the body being lowered into the cremation chamber. The heat, the smoke, the quiet hum of the machinery — it all felt unreal, like she was watching someone else’s life unravel on a screen. She hadn’t wept a single tear. Maybe it was shock, but it was probably just exhaustion.

“This… this is it, Nora,” the funeral attendant said gently, motioning to the button. “When you press it, it’ll start. Take as long as you need,” the attendant added softly, stepping back to give her space.

Nora nodded without turning around.

The room smelled of something sterile trying hard to seem peaceful — artificial flowers, she suspected, or some kind of diffuser plugged discreetly into the wall. Through the small reinforced window in the chamber door, she could see the edge of the casket. Plain wood.

She pressed the button.

The wooden box set ablaze. She stood and watched until she couldn’t anymore, and then looked at the floor instead, at the scuffed toes of the black flats she’d bought specifically for today and would probably never wear again.

“There,” she thought distantly. “That’s done.”

***

The will reading was two weeks later.

She had not expected anyone to show up. They all did. They filled the lawyer’s office with the particular energy of people trying very hard not to look like they were thinking about money.

The lawyer read without ceremony.

“Ruth Ellison bequeaths eighty percent of her estate, her shares in Ellison company holdings and all assets held under her name — to her granddaughter, Nora Ellison. The remaining twenty percent to be divided equally among surviving family members.”

The room shifted. A low murmur started somewhere behind her and spread. Nora stared at the wall above the lawyer’s head and let the voices blur into background noise. Recalculations, whispered negotiations, the sound of people who had not come to the cremation suddenly finding reasons to stay in the room. She signed where she was told to sign and left before anyone could speak to her directly.

Ruth’s house took three days to clear.

It was a small house — it had always felt small, though Nora had spent years of her childhood in it — and still it took three days, because grief had a way of slowing everything down to half speed, making even the simplest task feel like moving through water. She stood for a long time in the doorway of her grandmother’s bedroom, looking at the narrow bed with its quilted cover and the framed photograph on the nightstand — Nora at seven, gap-toothed and squinting into the sun, being held up by a woman who looked far too young to be anyone’s grandmother.

She put the photograph in the box she was keeping. Then she folded Ruth’s favorite cardigan and put it in the box too.

It was on the last day, pulling a battered tin box from beneath the bed, that she found them.

Papers. Official ones, from the look of them. A birth certificate she had never seen before, different from the amended one she’d always had. An old letter, and a photograph of a woman she didn’t recognize, standing in front of a building with a terracotta roof, dark-eyed and young.

On the back of the photograph, written in pencil so faint she had to tilt it toward the light: “Chiang Mai, 1998.”

Nora sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.

She read the letter twice. It plainly just read “Thai maid, Ratana, 18, had a baby girl, weighing 3.8kg, 1998.” Then she sat very still for a while, holding the photograph, looking at the woman who looked — she told herself she was imagining it — a little like her.

“Chiang Mai.”

She had always known she was adopted. Her parents, the Ellisons, who had died in a car accident when she was nine, leaving her to Ruth, had never hidden it from her. She was loved and she was wanted. That had always been enough. She had never felt the need to look further.

She wasn’t sure she felt the need now, exactly.

But she turned the photograph over again, reading the words “Chiang Mai,” with one raised brow and thought:  Thailand huh?, I could go.