Lahat ng Kabanata ng Rebirth; it’s too late, Dear ex: Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 100

Kara’s POV. “There are more of us,” I repeated. Xavier had stopped walking. We were on the courthouse steps and the city was below us and I was standing with my phone against my ear and this man, this Emmanuel Okafor from Abuja, was telling me that I had family. More family. Not just Adaeze. “How many?” I asked. “My mother had four children,” he said. “Lena was the second. I am the third. There are two others. An older sister named Chiamaka. A younger brother named Tobechukwu who we call Toby.” He paused. “Chiamaka lives in London. Toby is here in Abuja with me.” Another pause. “We have all been looking. In different ways. At different times. We never found her.” His voice was very steady. “And then Adaeze called last night and told me that Lena’s daughter had built a foundation and found sixty-four families and stood in a federal courthouse and that a judge had said her name in the official record.” I was standing completely still. My mother had four siblings. She had a whole

Kara’s POV. “It’s smaller than I expected,” Xavier said when we arrived. “That’s why I like it,” I said. The town was called Civitella. Not famous. Not impressive. Exactly what Xavier had described when he planned it, a small place near the coast where the pace of a day was decided by meals and light rather than schedules. Stone streets, low buildings, a harbor visible from the main road, the specific smell of salt and something warm and herbed that I couldn’t name. We had rented a house rather than a hotel. A small two-story place with terracotta floors and a kitchen with a window that looked out over a garden that nobody had tended too carefully in several years and was better for it. We put our bags down. I stood in the kitchen and looked out the window at the untended garden and felt the specific sensation of a place settling around me. Not the apartment in New York, which had become home gradually through accumulation. This was something else. A temporary belonging. The kind

Kara’s POV. “Two hundred and twelve families,” I read it out loud. Xavier was already reading over my shoulder. Neither of us said anything for a moment. I set the phone face down on the table beside my journal and looked at the window where the evening had settled into that particular Italian dark that was warmer and softer than New York dark. Two hundred and twelve. When I had first understood there were other families, in Park’s office reading from the drive, the number had been eleven. Eleven confirmed in the federal evidence. And I had thought that was large. I had thought that was the scope of it. Now it was two hundred and twelve. “We can’t call every family,” Xavier said. “No,” I said. “But they’re getting something.” “They’re getting something,” I said. “Financial recovery. Named acknowledgment. Their companies on a wall in the West Village that says they were builders.” I paused. “It’s not everything that was taken. It’s never going to be everything that was taken.

Kara’s POV. “She came from London,” I said out loud. Xavier was reading the message over my shoulder. “Your mother’s older sister,” he said. “My mother’s older sister,” I said. “She flew from London to New York and walked into the foundation on the day we came home.” I stared at the message for a moment. Then I typed to Amara: Is she still there? The response was immediate: She’s been here four hours. She said she’d wait as long as it took. She’s on the third floor looking at the wall. I put the phone down and looked at Xavier. “I need to go,” I said. “I know,” he said. “We just landed,” I said. “I know,” he said. “Go.” I did not change or unpack or do any of the things a person does when they have just returned from two weeks away. I picked up my bag and Xavier drove me to the West Village and when we arrived I went upstairs alone, the same way I had gone to meet Irish alone in the federal facility, because some things needed to be met directly without intermediary. The

Kara’s POV. “Kara Jones.” He said my name the way he said everything that was completely true. Without performance. Without the specific extra weight that people put into words when they are trying to make them sound significant. Just my name, in his voice, in our kitchen, on an ordinary night that had been many things and was now this. He was holding a ring. Small. Simple. A thin band with a single stone, deep blue, the color of the dress in the photograph Emmanuel had sent me. My mother in 1981, laughing in a garden. The color of the deep water. I had not known he knew about the photograph. I had not known he had seen me set it as my phone background on the walk back from the harbor in Civitella. He had known. Of course he had known. “I have loved you in one life where I was too afraid to say it,” he said. “And in this life I have been saying it in every way I knew how since the day I woke up. Not always in words. In presence. In preparation. In choosing to be somewhere you