We became, instead, the mother and daughter we could be starting now — two adult women, strangers in some ways and bound in the deepest way in others, learning each other from the beginning.

She did not know that I take my coffee black, or that I hum when I am concentrating, or a thousand other small facts a mother usually gathers across a childhood.

She learned them now, at fifty-some years old, the way you learn a new friend, and there was a sweetness in that I had not expected — in being newly discovered by my own mother, in watching her delight at each small thing she learned about the daughter she had only ever seen from across a street.

And Juniper, who had gained a grandmother out of nowhere, simply accepted it the way children accept good fortune, without needing the whole terrible story, folding my mother into her life as though she had always been there.

Some afternoons, watching the two of them at the kitchen table dusted with flour, I would feel Clement so strongly in the room that I half expected to turn and find him in the doorway, watching us with his quiet smile, finally able to stop protecting and simply enjoy the thing his protection had bought.

Chapter 23 — Do You Ever Regret Knowing