If a stranger ever approached me about her past, she said, I was to walk away and keep walking.
I had thought it was the illness talking.
I understood now that it had been the clearest thing she ever said to me — a warning, thrown forward across her own death, to a daughter she was terrified the past would someday come for.
It had come.
It had come through my own kitchen, through a woman I’d called family, into a cup I drank every morning.
I sat with that memory for a long time in the station, turning it over, and the more I looked at it the more it reorganized my entire understanding of my mother.