“It broke Clement’s heart every single day to keep us apart.

But it was the only way to keep you safe.”

I looked at her as she said it, and I tried to imagine what her twenty-four years had actually been, and I could not, quite, because it was a species of suffering I had never had to conceive of.

I had grieved a mother I believed was dead — a clean grief, however painful, with the mercy of finality in it.

She had grieved a daughter who was alive, whom she could see, whom she could stand ten feet from and not touch.

Every one of those milestones that I remembered as a wound in the shape of her absence, she had attended as a wound in the shape of her presence, close enough to see my face and forbidden to say my name.