I made myself a cup of coffee in Mama’s kitchen and sat at the table where I’d sat as a girl over cocoa, my hand smacked and my heart hurt, and I let myself cry for a good while — not the sharp grief of the funeral but something slower, an ache made of gratitude and sorrow so tangled I couldn’t have pulled them apart.

I was grieving a mother I had only just met, on the day after I buried her.

The woman I thought I’d known for a lifetime turned out to have a whole hidden life inside the one I’d seen, and I would spend the rest of my own life catching up to who she’d really been.

In the weeks after, I didn’t do anything dramatic with what she left me.

I paid, at long last, for the surgery a doctor had once told me might ease the old damage in my leg, and I walk a little easier now, at an age when I’d stopped believing my walk could change.