She told me how she had wanted to reach out so many times, but the longer the silence went on, the harder it felt to break. She had assumed I wouldn’t want to hear from her.

She had lived in this house for thirty years, quietly raising a family of her own, completely unaware that I had been searching for her.

We talked until the sun went down, tracing the paths our lives had taken, mourning the mothers we had lost, and laughing at the absurdity of a bake sale bringing us back together. Before I left that evening, she walked over to her counter, sliced a piece of a second buttermilk pie she had kept for herself, and placed it in front of me with two forks.

We ate it together. It tasted exactly like childhood, like forgiveness, and like a second chance that I never thought I’d get.