PART 5

My mother, Evelyn, had died of complications from an illness when I was seventeen.

She had raised me in Tacoma on a school librarian’s wages, taught me to mend a torn hem, and stayed up reading beside my bed whenever thunderstorms frightened me.

I knew nearly every story she’d chosen to tell about our life.

Apparently, I didn’t know the first chapter.

“She said my father was a carpenter,” I told Warren.