“I always told myself that one day I would show it to you.”

I did not know what to do with a sentence like that.

I had spent my life learning to need nothing, and here was a woman who had tended a garden for three decades against the chance that a stolen daughter might one day walk through it.

The scale of that faithfulness undid something in me that eighteen years of foster care had welded shut.

She took me up to it the next morning, and I understood, standing in it, what it had cost her to keep.

It was not a grand thing.