And then a woman next to the quilt said, quietly, “Are you Helen?”

That was Claire. She’d been standing there the whole time watching me read the card. She had that chin. She was wearing a green shirt and she had Vera’s eyes too, which made the whole thing somehow worse and better at the same time.

I said yes. She took a breath and said, “My mother has dementia. She’s been in memory care for about two years now. She doesn’t always know where she is, she doesn’t always know my name. But there is a woman named Helen she asks for constantly. We couldn’t figure out who it was for the longest time.”

I don’t know what I said right then. Something. “How long have you been looking?” maybe. Or maybe I just asked how Vera was. I think I asked how Vera was.

Here’s the part that’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t there. Vera and I didn’t have some quiet falling out. It wasn’t a slow drift. She stood up at my wedding in October of 1981, in front of my family and Bill’s family and all of our friends, and she said that she couldn’t stand there and watch me marry a man I didn’t love when the man I did love was sitting in the third row. Which was a thing she believed, and which, if I’m being completely honest, had maybe five percent of truth buried inside about forty layers of her own feelings that had nothing to do with me. Bill heard her. His mother heard her. My mother looked at the floor. I looked at Vera and I just said, very quietly, “Please sit down or please leave.” She left.

She sent me a letter two weeks later. I sent it back unopened. She sent another one.

I sent that one back too. After a while she stopped. And then forty-four years went by.

I’m not saying I was right. I’m also not saying she was right. I’ve had decades to think about it and I still land in a different place depending on the day. Bill and I were married for thirty-one years before he passed, and we were happy, genuinely happy, whatever Vera thought she knew about my heart in 1981. So there’s that. But I also know that I was angrier than the situation maybe required, and that I kept that anger fed and warm for a very long time because it was easier than missing her.

And I missed her. I missed her for forty-four years. I just didn’t let myself think about it very often.