But in that first hour she looked at me with kindness and no recognition, and I discovered that being loved as a stranger, by the person who once knew you best in all the world, is its own particular heartbreak, one I would not have believed could hurt more than her death had.

It did.

Because her death I had finished grieving.

This I had to begin.

Chapter 8 — The Fire

To understand what I was feeling, you have to know what I had believed for twenty years.

When I was ten years old, I was told that my mother had died in a house fire in our old neighborhood.

The firefighters never recovered a body — the structure had burned down to its foundation, and everyone agreed that no one inside could have survived, and so a body seemed almost beside the point.