It is one of the quieter cruelties of a long separation from a small child: they keep growing, and the version of them you carry in your memory goes stale, and you can lose them not only to distance but to the simple relentless fact of time changing them into someone your love no longer quite fits.

Elena had prepared for that grief on top of all the others.

And so it undid her completely to see, in the way Chloe looked at her from the doorway, that she had not been forgotten at all.

Whatever else the last five years had taken, they had not taken that.

The child in the doorway knew exactly who her mother was.

And that knowing, that unbroken thread of recognition across three years of absence, was almost harder to bear than forgetting would have been, because it meant that Chloe had held on, deliberately, through everything, to a mother the whole world had told her was a murderer.