He said there were no more secrets between us, & I believed him, as I always had, already knowing if there were, I’d believe him yet again.

Now I understood why David had stayed away all those Sundays—he hadn’t wanted to participate in the farce of visiting Patrick’s grave.

I was grieving for my mother—the mother who was a stranger to me now—not for the father who had been dead to me all these years.

My mother had told my father that Caitlin wasn’t his, & so he’d tried to kill himself, even though he still had me, for it wasn’t the loss of a baby’s paternity but the loss of Mother’s love.

We sat there, at an impasse, & in that moment of silence, we were acknowledging this was now the way it would always be between us.

“She had told me when I was carrying you that my firstborn daughter would steal away my first love & become my enemy,” Mother said.

I wondered if Madame Novacek’s eyes had looked into Mother’s, &, rather than see in her crystal ball, saw in them, what this woman, my mother, would become.