It was a modest rooftop plot — roses, some herbs, a small tree that had clearly been replaced more than once over the years.

But she had planted it the spring after I was taken, she told me, when the police had closed the case and the forged death certificate had been filed and everyone in her life had begun, gently, to tell her it was time to grieve and move on.

She had refused.

She had planted a garden instead — a living thing she would have to tend every day, in every season, for as long as it took — as a way of refusing to accept that I was gone.

As long as the garden lived, she had decided, she was still a mother waiting for her daughter, not a woman mourning a dead child.

And she had kept it alive for thirty years.