It was the smallness of it that undid her, and that she treasured most.

For six years she had survived on photographs of a boy she could not touch, had memorized a childhood she was not allowed to be part of, had grieved every ordinary thing she was missing — the scraped knees, the lost teeth, the packed lunches.

She had thought, in the dark, that if she ever got out, the reunion would be enormous, cinematic, a single overwhelming moment of return.

Instead it was turning out to be made of the smallest possible pieces: a squished sandwich, a boy bragging to a friend, a crooked crust.

And she understood, crying quietly in her car outside the school, that this was exactly right — that a mother’s love is not actually made of grand moments but of ten thousand tiny ordinary ones, the lunches and the routines and the being-there, and that these were precisely the things that had been stolen from her, and precisely the things she was now, one squished sandwich at a time, getting back.

She did not want a cinematic reunion.