She wrote that Samantha was her mother because she had raised her, and Rose was her first mother because she had brought her into the world.

Neither sentence required the other to become smaller.

She asked Gregory and me to write letters too, but only on one condition: “Don’t tell future me what I ought to feel.

Tell her what you remember.”

I wrote about her first steps beside the coffee table, the way she demanded the same bedtime story six nights running, and the pride I felt when she defended a classmate who was being teased.

I told her I had been afraid of losing her even though she never belonged to me like an object.