She bent her own rules because she couldn’t think of a way around them and used the identification that Sancho brought to create an identity for Emma. Her mother spent days with Emma and Nora spent evenings, and the questions were slowly getting less intense. Nora was even beginning to tolerate her mother’s presence at dinner. Darnell, on the other hand, didn’t even acknowledge Nora’s existence anymore. Squidgy liked this turn of events; she was acting as if she were the only cat in the house. Darnell was acting as if Emma were the only person; Nora felt it only fair. Emma was slowly beginning to accept some of the bits of daily life in this world: the noise, the plumbing, and the food. She didn’t like the way that everything seemed to be too difficult to be made at home. She wanted to make her own soap (even though she loved the lavender-scented specialty soaps that Nora had bought to soothe herself after her divorce), her own clothes (Amanda suggested buying fabric but Emma wanted to weave her own) and her own shoes (Nora drew the line at running a tanning operation out of her own home).
