Before leaving, I asked one final question.

“When you stood outside that cottage with Mark, did you ever imagine what your mother and I were doing at that exact moment?”

Laura looked down.

“Sometimes.”

I wanted to shout.

Instead, I stood, thanked the attorney for arranging the meeting, and walked into the hallway.

It took me a long time to reach my truck.

By then I was shaking, not with anger alone but with grief for a daughter who was alive and yet impossibly far away from the young woman I remembered.