Who Is Nora Vellick? The Part I Left Out of Before

In Before there is one sentence about me, and I almost cut it. I wrote that finding her took nine months and three countries I had never been to, and one country I had promised myself I would never go back to.

Readers ask about that line more than anything else in the book. I left it unexplained because the book was about her. This page is about me, and the reason I was the one who went looking.

The date at the top of the page

In the first chapter of Before, a nurse in a wine bar knows I'm a reporter because I wrote the date at the top of a blank page before anything else. She said only reporters and detectives do that.

I learned it from my sister.

Her name was Mara. She was six years older than me, and in our house she was the one who noticed things. Our mother worked nights in a hotel laundry, and our father had left before I could keep him. Mara signed my school forms and knew when the rent was due. She kept a notebook on the kitchen table and wrote the date at the top of every page. When I asked why, she said that if you write the date down, nobody can tell you later it didn't happen.

Sunday calls

When I was seventeen, Mara took a job abroad through an agency that placed young women in hotels. The money was better than anything our town could offer. She was twenty-three, and she was going to send some home and come back in a year with enough to start something.

She called every Sunday at six. For the first months the calls were long, and she described the hotel, the other girls, a manager who was kind to her. Then they got shorter. She stopped describing things. The last time we spoke she sounded tired, and when I asked what was wrong she said, "I'll tell you when I'm home."

The next Sunday the phone didn't ring, and it hasn't since.

What looking taught me

I spent most of my twenties trying to find her. The agency had closed. Its address led to an accountant, and the accountant led to another company registered somewhere else. The police were polite for about a year. The hotel had changed owners twice.

Above all, I learned how people sound just before they stop talking. A girl who had worked with her told me one sentence on the phone and then hung up: "She wasn't the only one who left that summer." I never reached her again. When I was twenty-five, I went back to that country one last time. A man in a government office I won't describe looked at my folder for a long while and told me, kindly, that I should go home and live my life. On the flight back I promised myself I wouldn't return.

A year later I wrote my first profile. I've spent eleven years since then writing about people who would rather not be written about. Mara is the reason, though I never put her name in a byline.

Why I couldn't let her go

When the nurse told me about a woman nobody could find, who had a before she never opened, I opened a new file that afternoon. I told myself it was a story. Looking back, I think I recognized her before I knew anything about her.

At our first meeting she told me she had told her story to two people in twenty years. "One of them is dead now. The other one, I don't know where she is." I asked the right questions and wrote down her answers. Then I went to the bathroom and stood at the sink for a long time.

The trail to her ran through the one country I had promised never to go back to. I went. I didn't look for Mara this time. I want to be honest about that, because it is the part I'm least proud of.

Then the woman I'd found stopped coming. At our last real conversation she said there was one thing she hadn't told me, the reason for all of it, and that she would tell me on Thursday. She wasn't there. I've written about that in The Trail. I sat at that table for three hours, and somewhere in the second hour I understood it was the second time in my life a woman had promised to tell me the one thing later, and then hadn't come.

What I still do

My mother still lives in the same town. On Sundays at six she keeps the phone on the table beside her and doesn't mention it. I don't either.

I keep a notebook and write the date at the top of every page. I publish the records in the order the woman asked for, because she set the terms, and because I know what it costs when nobody writes anything down. Before is the first record. Five Rules holds what she told me before her trail went cold. The order to read them in is here.

If you know something about her, there is a way to reach me through the series page. I'm still looking, for her and for the one I never found.

N. V.

Questions people ask

Who is Nora Vellick?

Nora Vellick is a journalist who has spent eleven years writing profiles of people who would rather not be written about. She is the author of The Husband Experiment, Become My Papi and The Work Nobody Sees, sold only on noravellick.com.

Why did Nora Vellick start The Husband Experiment?

A stranger in a wine bar told her about a woman nobody could find. Nora recognized something in that story because of her own sister, Mara, who went abroad for work and never came home.

Where should I start reading Nora Vellick?

Start with Before, the first record of The Husband Experiment. It is free and takes about fifteen minutes to read.