“Dad?” For a moment he stared at me as though time had folded wrong, as though I were a ghost and not the other way around.

Then his cracked lips moved, and tears slid sideways into his gray hair.

“Nadine,” he rasped.

“You got so big.” I fell against the side of the ambulance and a paramedic had to hold me upright, because my legs would not.

My father was alive.

My mother had buried an empty casket and let me grieve for twenty-six years.