“I can’t,” Katherine said.
“Then you can leave right now.”
She stood.
She stood up from my grandmother’s table, and she looked at my daughters — Amelia at my chair, Greta on the stairs —
and I want to be fair and tell you that something crossed her face, some small ghost of the woman who’d had a baby in that hospital.
It crossed.
It kept going.
“You’ve changed,” she said, at the door.
“No,” I said. “I sat still. You’re the one who kept moving.”
She left.
The bracelet flashed once under the porch light, and then the dark had her.
I sat in my chair in the hall for a long moment, looking at the door.
Ten years ago, I hadn’t been able to follow a door.
I’d been in a hospital bed with a baby on my chest and a three-year-old in the hallway, and the door had closed, and I had listened to a suitcase go down a corridor and had not been able to do one single thing about it.
