Then I remembered the bracelet. Last year, the morning after my birthday, a gold bracelet showed up on my porch. No box. No card. Eighteen-karat, the jeweler told me, worth about a hundred and eighty dollars.

I figured Wes left it. He never said yes when I asked, but he never said no either, so I let it go. I went and got it out of the drawer and sat there with it in my palm, and I knew. It wasn’t from Wes.

I didn’t sleep that night. I kept the letter on the kitchen table and kept walking past it. Around seven the next morning I was standing at the window with cold coffee in my hand, and a blue Honda rolled up across the street and stopped. Same one. My stomach went tight.

I didn’t think. I went out in my socks. The concrete was cold and damp right through the cotton and I didn’t care. A woman sat behind the wheel. Older. Gray hair pulled back. When she saw me coming she didn’t drive off. She just rolled the window down slow, like she’d been waiting forty-one years for me to do exactly this.

She looked up at me. And she had my eyes. The same heavy lids, the same gray that turns a little green near the edge. My whole life I thought I got those from a dead man in a photo.

“I’m your mother,” she said.

I couldn’t make my feet move. “What,” was all I got out.

“I know you don’t know me.” Her voice was thin and careful, like she’d practiced it on the windshield a hundred times. “I’m Carol. I left the bracelet.”

“You come every year,” I said.

“Every May 14th.” Her chin shook when she nodded. “I used to park by the Hendersons’. They moved years ago. I kept coming anyway.”

I told her about the letter. The wallpaper. What Ruth wrote about her crying at the door. Carol’s hand went to her mouth. “She kept it,” she whispered. “All these years, she kept it.”

“She knew you were out here,” I said, and my voice cracked on it. “She knew the whole time.”

A truck went by behind her and Carol flinched at it. An old flinch. The kind that lives in your back. She glanced down the street the way you check a door you swear you already locked.

“I have to tell you something before he knows I came,” she said. “He’s still alive.”

“Who?”

“Your father.” She said it low. “He’s closer to you than you think.”

The sprinkler two yards down was ticking, that wet metal sound, and I held onto it because everything else felt like it was leaning sideways. “What do you mean closer,” I said.