If they let me, I would be arriving in them for the first time, a stranger asking for a door to be opened, with no right to expect it and every one of my absent years standing behind me in the hall.

She let that sit, because it needed to.

Then, two days later, she gave me an address in a modest neighborhood on the West Side.

Chapter 11 — Mateo and Ivy

An older woman answered the door, and I knew her at once — Mrs.

Garcia, Samantha’s mother, grayer now.