I stood in the hallway for a long time.
My mother knows you very well.
That sounds like Miranda.
The beams, of course. The greenhouse, of course. The floor-to-ceiling windows, of course, she always wanted light, she drew on windows as a child, she was always turning toward light.
She had known.
She had described me, to a neighbor on the phone, by describing the choices I had made in a house she had never seen. She had looked at the description of a building and recognized her daughter in it.
And she had not been there.
That was the thing I had to hold alongside each other. The knowing and the not-being-there. The recognition and the absence.
I had spent thirty-one years believing, at some level, that the Brooke-first pattern was about not seeing me. That the accumulated choices were evidence of a mother who did not know who her older daughter was.
