We spent the next hour looking through old photographs.

I learned she had worked at a library, later an accounting office.

She had never remarried.

Her cane was the result of lasting damage from the car accident, worsened by arthritis.

She lived in a small apartment forty miles away and grew tomatoes on a balcony.

Not one of those facts could repair twenty-three years.

But each fact made her a person instead of a ghost.

When I finally asked for a copy of the records, she handed me a folder she’d prepared without forcing it into my hands.