She was simply, entirely, herself again, and more than herself.

There is a particular joy, and I did not know it existed until that autumn, in watching a person you love come back to themselves after you had feared they were gone for good.

On the patio six months earlier I had held a frail, flinching, hollowed-out woman and wondered, privately, whether the mother I remembered still existed underneath, or whether two years had worn her away past recovering.

She had proven me wrong, gloriously.