I stared at him.
I should have been angry.
Instead, I found myself wanting more.
More stories.
More pieces.
More evidence that the little girl I had been actually existed in his memories.
On the third day, he told me that Mom used to tap one finger against her glass whenever she was angry.
I looked down.
My index finger was tapping against the arm of the chair.
Thomas smiled.
I stopped immediately.
“Don’t look pleased.”
“I’m not, dear.”
“You are.”
I spat it right back at him.
He sighed.
“Maybe a little.”
For several hours that day, we talked about my mother.
We talked about the way she sang badly while washing dishes.
How she once drove forty miles back to a gas station because she’d forgotten her purse there.
How she tied my shoes twice because I always managed to kick them loose.
For years, Mom had existed in my mind as fragments.
A smell.
A voice.
A few photographs.
Half-remembered moments.
Thomas gave me pieces I didn’t have.
Pieces I’d never known I was missing.
On the fourth day, I finally asked the question that had been sitting inside me since I walked through his door.
“Why?”
Thomas looked toward the window.
“Why did you leave me there?”
For a long time, he said nothing.
Then he whispered, “Because I was a coward.”
I waited.
After Annie died, Thomas explained, he remarried.
“It was new,” he said. “Fragile.”
“So?”
“I told myself foster care would be temporary.”
I looked away, flexing my fingers into a fist.
“I told myself professionals could handle what you’d been through better than I could.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Yes.”
His answer was immediate.
“I chose the easier life.”
The sentence hurt more because he didn’t try to defend himself.
“I thought I’d fix it later.”
“Did later never arrive?”
Thomas looked at me.
“Every year that I waited made approaching you harder. Then you aged out. You moved away. I lost track of you. By the time I finally started looking, you were gone.”
I laughed bitterly.
“Poor you. I didn’t die.”
“Susan…”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I walked away.
By the fifth day, something strange had happened.
