Some part of me had never fully closed the door.

And now I understood why.

Because the door had never been meant to close.

Because my mother had walked out of that fire alive, and wandered twenty years through a country that never learned her name, and come, at the very end of it, to stand in my foyer in a coat that made me cover my nose.

I had grieved a woman who was not dead.

I had thrown away a locket’s worth of hope.