She had been the great settled sorrow of my life, the thing that had already happened, finished and safe in its finishedness.

And now that face — the exact face from the photographs, aged twenty-four years but unmistakable — was standing in a doorway on a dark street, breathing, wet-eyed, saying my name.

My body understood before my mind did.

That is why I screamed; it was not a decision.

It was the sound a person makes when the most fundamental fact of her life reveals itself to be untrue while she is standing on a stranger’s porch at midnight.

Some part of me had spent twenty-four years learning to live without this woman, building a self around the shape of her absence.