I had always told the story as a lucky accident: a chance meeting in a Vancouver coffee line, a spark, the beginning of something clean and new, two thousand miles away from all the wreckage.

I had loved that story.

It was the proof that my life had moved on to better things.

And standing in my mother’s kitchen watching Bianca refuse to meet my eyes, I understood that it had not been an accident at all.

She had known who I was before that coffee line.

She had known my mother, my marriage, my private grief, the whole shape of my life, before she ever let me think I was a stranger she’d happened to smile at.