Sitting on the aisle with her silver hair and my exact face, calm as a woman who’d been waiting thirty-six years for a room exactly like this.

My mother entered at 8:50 with her expensive Indianapolis lawyer.

She swept in the way she enters everything: chin lifted, camera-ready, the county’s most beautiful fifty-eight-year-old woman, in the deep emerald suit she reserves for major bank meetings.

She swept the room in one jeweler’s pass.

It snagged for half a step on Renee.

I watched my mother see her sister.