I searched her face for anger and found something more difficult to face: exhaustion left over from a grief she had lived with for years.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Her expression hardened.

“I tried.”

I wanted to say that she could have found me.

I wanted to say I had never received a call, a message, a letter.

Then I remembered the number I had disconnected and the address I had stopped checking.

I remembered blocking her calls in the last bitter weeks, as though silence could make me the innocent one.