I Turned My Back to the Flames

Then she whispered, “Send her in.” Natalie stepped through the door.

Neither woman spoke.

Edith squinted through the morning light, searching the face of a grown stranger for a child she’d known for one afternoon four decades ago.

And then Natalie lifted one hand to her own cheek — an old, unconscious habit — and something caught in Edith’s memory, some image of a small girl with a dirty face on a porch step, and she whispered, “Natalie?” And Natalie burst into tears and said, “Yes.”

Chapter 15 — Forty Years of My Life