She had watched me grow up through a series of stolen glimpses, a decade and more of them, aging in the crowd while I did not know to look for her.

She had watched me marry a man she had never been introduced to.

She had watched me become a mother without being allowed to be a grandmother.

And she had done it, all of it, for twenty-four years, because the alternative was to risk the very safety that made my ordinary life possible.

I had thought, walking up to that porch, that I was the one who had lost a mother.

I understood now that she had lost far more, and lost it more slowly, and lost it in the cruelest possible way — by being near enough, always, to see exactly what she was missing.