“I don’t remember this little girl.” It felt as though a hand had reached into my chest and closed around my heart.

I had found her — against every possible odd, after twenty years, in my own bathtub, I had found my mother alive — and she looked at me with the polite, apologetic kindness you offer a stranger who has mistaken you for someone else.

The woman I had spent my childhood grieving was sitting an arm’s length away, and the distance between us was somehow greater than death had been, because death I had made my peace with, and this I had no idea how to bear.

My mother was found.