The card had only said three words.
“From the window.”
I had thought it was a mistake. A wrong card. Some mix-up at the florist.
“It was her,” I whispered.
“It was her,” Grandma said.
I sat there in that little consultation room with the sailboat painting on the wall, and I tried to take it all in. The window. The cherry tree. Grace. The girl in the photograph. The doctor who never left. The Christmas cards. The lilies.
Then I turned to my grandmother.
“Twenty-seven years,” I said. My voice was shaking. “I’ve known you my whole life. You raised me. You sat at that kitchen table with me every night after Dad died. And you never told me. Not one word.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
She looked at me with those soft gray eyes. And for the first time in my life, my grandmother looked old. Really old. Small and frail and scared.
