That was the trail. « That was all of it. The man has vanished, » Nora said. She was looking at Caleb directly, the way she always looked at people she was speaking to fully, without reservation. No one has been able to find him. » Caleb was looking at his coffee cup. Eli eating cereal at the end of the table had gone still in the particular way children go still when they understand more than the adults in the room have said.
Caleb set the cup down slowly. What address were you going to when you got stuck last night? Nora reached into her coat and took out a piece of paper folded twice, the creases worn, the handwriting in the slightly uneven print of a man whose hands had been shaking when he wrote it. She read out the address. Caleb recognized it without effort. It was the apartment he had left eight years ago when he left Nashville. When he left everything, he did not say this.
He picked up his coffee cup and looked out the window at his yard where his truck sat with a cracked tail light he hadn’t gotten around to fixing. Eli watched his father’s face with a quiet precision of a child who has learned to read it. Nora was watching him, too. In the particular way that intelligent people understand things before they have all the evidence, not through logic, but through the quality of someone’s silence, she was beginning to understand that she had found what she was looking for.
She looked at Caleb Morrow sitting across the kitchen table at the work-roughened hands wrapped around the coffee cup, at the quiet that lived in his face like something he had chosen and then forgotten he had chosen, and she understood without being able to say precisely how that the address on her father’s paper had not been wrong. She had just been looking for the wrong version of the man. She stood up from the table and followed Dennis toward the hallway, meaning to give him a file he’d been asking about since they’d arrived.
The door to the room at the end of the hall was open. The room she’d slept in the night before, and she was almost past it when something on the wall of the adjacent room caught her eye. She stopped. The room was used for storage, cardboard boxes, a toolbox, a broken lamp that had been waiting to be thrown away. But on the wall above a narrow desk in a dark wood frame that had been placed there and then apparently forgotten was a diploma.
