What healed me was standing in front of clear glass and counting to a hundred.
Brian broke something that day. That’s true. I’ll never get the wavy glass back. I’ll never see my reflection the way I saw it at fifteen, standing in my grandmother’s bedroom, with her face behind mine.
But I see something else now.
I see a woman who walked into a flooded house alone and turned off every faucet with shaking hands. Who took the pictures. Who didn’t make the phone call. Who stood in a courthouse hallway and said, plainly, You smashed my grandmother’s mirror, without raising her voice.
I like her.
I didn’t know her eight months ago. I’m glad I know her now.
So here is the question I keep coming back to, sitting on my couch on Sunday afternoons with my father’s coffee cup still warm on the table, looking at that crooked mirror on the wall:
