For one strange suspended moment on that porch, both were still possible.

I could still have made myself believe I had misheard, could have knocked again and let the stranger explain it away, could have chosen the easier story.

I did not choose it.

Some part of me, standing there with my carry-on bag at my feet, already knew that the door had not been shut on a misunderstanding.

It had been shut on my mother’s whole life, quietly, for two years, and I had simply been too far away to hear it close until now.

Chapter 2 — Six Years, One Porch

To understand why I was standing on that porch, dusty and exhausted, with a carry-on bag at my feet and no one expecting me, you have to know where I had been for the six years before it.

I had spent those years overseas, in Dubai, working the kind of hours that swallow a life whole.

Eighty-hour weeks.

Projects that ran through the night.

Summers where the heat came off the pavement in visible waves and the air conditioning strained and failed.

I had gone abroad for exactly one reason, which was money, and I had earned it, and I had sent a great deal of it home, because everything I was building over there was really for one person back here.

My mother, Nora, who had raised me alone, who had worked her own hands raw for decades so that I could have the start she never got.

Two years into that contract, I had done the thing I had promised myself I would do since I was a girl.