Why Am I here?

Six weeks earlier, she'd been standing 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."

Nora nodded without turning around, and pressed the button.

The wooden box set ablaze. She watched until she couldn't anymore, 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 hadn't expected anyone to show up. They all did — filling the lawyer's office with the particular energy of people trying very hard not to look like they were thinking about money.

"Ruth Ellison bequeaths eighty percent of her estate," the lawyer read, without ceremony, "to her granddaughter, Nora Ellison. The remaining twenty percent to be divided equally among surviving family members."

A low murmur spread behind her — recalculations, whispered negotiations, the sound of people who hadn't 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.

Ruth's house took three days to clear. On the last day, pulling a battered tin box from beneath the bed, she found them.

Papers. A birth certificate she'd 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, in pencil so faint she had to tilt it toward the light: Chiang Mai, 1998.

The letter read simply: Thai maid, Ratana, 18, had a baby girl, weighing 3.8kg, 1998.

Nora sat very still, holding the photograph, looking at a woman who looked — she told herself she was imagining it — a little like her.

She had always known she was adopted. Her parents, who'd died in a car accident when she was nine, had never hidden that from her. She was loved, she was wanted. That had always been enough.

She turned the photograph over again, reading the words Chiang Mai, one brow raised. Thailand, huh. I could go.

A few days later, she fell asleep in a budget meeting. Not a slow drift — a full, head-dropping, snoring herself awake situation, in a glass-walled conference room with nine other people present.

"Okay," Maya said, once the room had emptied. She set a coffee down and sat beside her. "Talk."

"I'm fine."

"You snored, Nora. You've handed in two pieces this month I had to quietly fix. You've been late four times. You cried in the bathroom on Friday." A pause. "Lena told me. Not to get you in trouble. Because she was worried."

Nora looked at her coffee. "My grandmother died. She was the only one I had left." A breath. "I found some things in her house. There's this girl in a photo who looks crazily like me, and I keep thinking — what if she's my real mother?"

Maya stared at her. "You can't just assume anything. But holy shit, really?" A beat. "Even if she was, I'm sure Ruth had a reason not to say anything."

"So instead of practically going insane," Maya said, cupping Nora's cheeks, "take a proper leave. Go wherever you need to go."

"I think," Nora said slowly, "I might go to Thailand."

Maya blinked. "Weird. But okay. Go."

She went to find Daniel before she left. His office was empty, his jacket still on the chair. A handmade card sat on the desk. Happy Father's Day. Thank you for being my everything. She was still holding it when he appeared in the doorway.

"Miss Nora. I didn't know you were stopping by."

"I'm going away for a bit. Thailand. Chiang Mai."

He sat down slowly. "Why Thailand?"

"To rest." She didn't look at him when she said it. "I'll book the accommodation myself, I've been looking at this spot—"

"Send me the details. I'll book it." Final, the way he always was about anything that concerned her. "It's part of my job."

Her eyes drifted back to the card. "Is that a Father's Day card?"

"Yes."

"Do you have a daughter, Daniel? In all the years I've known you—"

"Someone like a daughter," he said simply. "She calls me Father. It's a long story."

"I'd love to meet her someday."

He smiled, and slid the card into a drawer. "Someday."

The flight took longer than she expected. The cottage — chosen partly for its price, partly because the listing photo made it look like exactly the kind of place a person could sit quietly and figure things out — cost less.

She packed the tin box last, wrapped in the cardigan that still smelled faintly of her grandmother, and zipped the case shut.

"Right," she told Lilly, who sat on the suitcase looking deeply suspicious of the entire arrangement. "Thailand."

Lilly blinked at her slowly.

"It'll be fine," Nora said.

She would later reflect that she had been spectacularly, almost impressively, wrong about that.