My own blood.
And she was also a grown woman I had essentially met an hour earlier.
Both truths existed at once.
I cried into her blue hair.
She cried against my shoulder.
And I held her the way I had wanted to hold a seven-year-old girl in a driveway twenty-three years earlier.
We stayed at the kitchen table until after midnight.
Amelia had endless questions.
And I had decades of answers that finally had somewhere to go.
“What was Mom like as a teenager?”
“Stubborn.”
“How stubborn?”
“The kind of stubborn that could become an Olympic event.”
“Did she really hate mushrooms?”
“She could find one tiny mushroom inside an entire casserole and hold it up like evidence in a murder investigation.”
“Could she sing?”
“Only if we use the word ‘sing’ very generously.”
Amelia laughed until she cried.
And every question gave me something too.
For twenty-three years, memories of Claire existed inside me with nowhere to go.
