“I wish I could have heard every word.”

“You can hear the new ones.”

She nodded, crying quietly.

We stayed for nearly an hour.

At one point she told me about the day I was born.

Not the polished version my father liked to tell, but a ridiculous memory of a nurse who kept calling me Caroline and my mother correcting her while half-asleep.

Then I told her about getting lost at the state fair when I was sixteen, a story she had never heard.

Our histories overlapped for fourteen years, disappeared into separate lives, and now slowly met again.