The Man I Loved Disappeared the Exact Night I Told Him We Were Having a Baby — Two Weeks Later He Knelt in My Grandfather’s Gravel Driveway and Told Me He Hadn’t Run From Fatherhood; He’d Run to Burn Down His Entire Inheritance So His Family Could Never Come for Our Child

I had lost her at four.

What I had of her was a shoebox of photographs and a few sensory ghosts — the smell of a particular soap, a snatch of a lullaby, the feeling of being lifted.

I had built a mother out of those fragments the way you build a constellation out of a handful of stars, mostly empty space and imagination.

And the mother I had built was gentle, and faded, and sad — the soft-focus dead mother of a child’s mind.

Now here was Bruno telling me she had been wild.