The air left my body in a single ragged gasp, and I pressed a hand hard over my mouth, but a sob tore through my throat before I could catch it.

Clara.

My mother’s name was Clara.

I had not heard anyone say my mother’s name aloud in decades.

For forty-five years, I had believed my father was dead.

My grandmother had always told me so, insisted on it: that he had died in an industrial accident when I was small, that he was gone and would not be spoken of.

I had grown up an orphan of the state on the strength of that story.