When we pressed her again, she sighed with theatrical patience. “He’s someone important to me,” she said. “That’s all you need to know right now.” Important. The word cracked something in me. How could she say that and not explain further? “Important” should have been reserved for us.
We tried gentle coaxing. “Is he a professor?” Martin asked. “A counselor?” I added, hoping to slot this stranger neatly into some harmless category. Nora only shook her head. “You’re imagining it all wrong,” she murmured. But she refused to tell us what the “right” thing was.