The first line was enough to tighten everything in my chest.

I’m sorry, Susanna.

Then the next sentence. I should have told you what Delroy did with your settlement. I sat down hard in Mama’s kitchen chair.

Chapter 5 — Seventeen Again

And just like that I was seventeen years old again.

It is strange how a sentence in your dead mother’s handwriting can collapse thirty years in an instant.

One moment I was a grown woman on a kitchen floor with a cardboard box of beets at my feet; the next I was a girl in a cast, propped on the good couch, listening to the grown-ups talk in the kitchen about money in the low voices adults use when they think you can’t hear.

I could smell the plaster of the cast.