Standing in the dim light of the hallway was Philippa — my mother, who was supposed to have died twenty-four years ago.

I staggered back against the porch railing, my heart pounding so hard I could not draw air.

“Cordelia?” the woman whispered, her eyes brimming, taking a trembling step toward me.

There is no way to prepare for the face of a dead person.

I had grieved my mother my entire life — had grieved her the way you grieve someone you were too young to remember, which is its own particular ache, a grief for an absence rather than a person, a hole shaped like a woman I knew only from photographs.

I had built her, over twenty-four years, out of those framed images and my father’s few soft stories: a mother made of silver hair and a crescent scar and the smell of a perfume I could not actually remember but was sure I did.