The explosion threw her against a wall, and somehow, burned and choking and half-conscious, she dragged herself out through a broken window at the back of the house, and staggered away from the flames into the dark, not knowing where she was or, soon, who she was.

A long-haul trucker found her unconscious near a rest stop many miles away and left her at a small rural clinic.

She had no identification.

And when she woke, days later, she could not tell them her name, because she no longer knew it.

What came after was twenty years I can barely stand to think about — shelters and cold and day-labor and the particular cruelty that the world saves for a woman who cannot say who she is.

She drifted from state to state, and then, in the last years, something turned her back toward Chicago without her understanding why.