“I don’t hate her,” I said, and found, somewhat to my own surprise, that it was completely true. “I wish she’d trusted me enough to tell me sooner. But I don’t hate her.”

“I don’t hate her.”

“Grace knows her mother’s gone,” Renata said. “She doesn’t know yet that you exist. Naomi wanted that conversation to happen only if you were ready to have it, and only in person, when the time felt right.”

“Is now too soon?” I asked.

Renata was quiet a moment. “I think,” she said, finally, “it’s about ten years overdue. But I understand if you need a little time first, to catch your breath before you meet her.”

“I think it’s about ten years overdue.”

I drove out to Renata’s house three days later, a small blue house with a wraparound porch, the same one from the photograph Naomi had tucked inside her letter.

Renata met me at the door, a tall, steady woman in her fifties with kind, careful eyes that had clearly spent the last several months bracing for this exact conversation.

“She’s in the backyard,” Renata said. “I told her a friend of her mother’s was coming by today. I didn’t want to say more than that until I knew you were ready.”

I followed her through the house, my heart slamming against my ribs harder than it had at my own wedding five days before Naomi died.

Grace was sitting cross-legged in the grass, sketching something in a battered notebook, dark curly hair pulled back in two uneven puffs, exactly the way I remembered Naomi wearing her own hair at twenty years old in half the photographs from our college years.

She looked up when the screen door creaked.

“Hi,” she said, cautious, polite in the particular way children are polite with strangers they haven’t yet decided whether to trust.

“Hi,” I said back, my voice cracking on one syllable.

She tilted her head, studying my face a long moment, the exact same careful, appraising look I remembered Naomi giving me the very first day we met in that lecture hall thirteen years earlier.

“You have my eyes,” Grace said, finally, like she was working out a puzzle out loud.

“You have my eyes.”

I sat down slow in the grass beside her, careful not to move too fast, the way you approach anything fragile and precious and entirely unfamiliar all at once.

“Your mama told me a lot about you,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true yet, but felt like the right place to start. “She loved you more than anything else in this whole world.”

Grace’s eyes filled, quick, the way a child’s grief arrives sudden and complete without any of the careful walls adults learn to build around it.

“I miss her so much,” she whispered.

“I miss her so much.”

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