“At first because I was afraid.”
“And later?”
She swallowed.
“Because I chose myself.”
I stepped back.
“You chose yourself by letting us bury you?”
“I know how awful that sounds.”
“It sounds awful because it was.”
She nodded.
“I know.”
Then she admitted she had searched for me online four years earlier.
She knew where I lived.
She knew I had a job.
She had seen photographs of the life I had rebuilt.
“And that made staying away easier?” I asked.
Her face crumpled.
“Yes.”
I looked at her for a long time.
“I can understand wanting your own identity.”
She waited.
“I can understand hating comparisons. I can even understand being afraid that coming home would swallow you back into the person everyone remembered.”
Tears slid down her face.
“But I will never understand why my grief had to pay for your independence.”
Clara began crying harder.
“I know.”
