The Story Continues After Part 2

Yet I knew that face better than my own.

I recognized the small dark birthmark beside her left eye, and I knew the exact way she tilted her head whenever someone spoke to her.

Above all, I recognized her gentle smile, which was the very smile I had spent more than two decades trying to remember in my dreams.

PART 3

I opened the door before I knew I had decided to move.

The traffic on the street rushed past, and the convenience store bell jingled behind me, ordinary noises belonging to a world that had not just split in two.

“Mom?”

The woman looked toward me.

Her smile vanished.

The cane slipped on the concrete, and Lucas caught her elbow.

He saw me a heartbeat later.

His expression wasn’t the guilt I had expected from an unfaithful husband.

It was fear, followed by something worse: recognition that an event he had rehearsed could no longer be controlled.

“Claire,” he said.

I had never told him about the little birthmark.

I had never described the way my mother held a cane because, in my memories, she hadn’t needed one.

Yet there he stood with a woman who had watched me grow up only in photographs.