After coming to that horrific realization, the investigator set out to fulfill her purpose of going into the machine: finding her vanished children. The trip took "a long time" since there are no pilots to conduct flights or boats that head directly from Australia to New York any more. However, the street lights still turned on at night when Nora finally arrived back home in Mapleton. There, she found her son Jeremy, now "a tall teenage boy with curly hair," and her daughter Erin, now about 11, still living in their home. The kids were with Nora’s husband Doug, who has a pretty partner, and they were all smiling and happy. "In a world full of orphans, they still had each other," she reasons. "And I was a ghost who had no place there."