They were twenty-four years of a man refusing, on my mother’s behalf, to miss my life, even when missing it in person was the price of keeping me alive.

Chapter 22 — Ten Minutes Away

Philippa sold her small, isolated house and moved into a sunlit cottage just ten minutes from my family.

Rebuilding a relationship that two decades of silence had hollowed out was not instant, and it was not effortless.

There were long, quiet afternoons full of hesitant questions and sudden tears and painful memories neither of us knew how to hold.

But there was joy in it too — watching my daughter sit at the kitchen table, laughing, while my mother taught her to bake apple pancakes from Clement’s handwritten recipe.