On every day she could not attend as my mother, Clement had gone as my father and brought the day home to her in photographs, so that she could live my life beside me even from the shadows.

I sat on the attic floor and went through those albums for hours, and it rearranged my whole memory of my own life.

Because I had been in every one of those photographs, and I had never known I was being watched over.

My graduation — I remembered that day as one of the loneliest of my life, scanning the crowd for a mother who wasn’t there, telling myself it was childish to still feel the lack of her at eighteen.

And here was the truth: she had been there.

Third row of the visitors’ section, a woman in a dark coat, close enough to see my face, forbidden to call my name.