A question I hadn't understood.
An answer I'd almost forgotten giving.
I pressed my hand against my mouth.
She'd spent years wondering whether she was wanted.
And somehow, without knowing it, I'd helped her stop wondering.
"She trusted me?"
Her mother nodded.
"Even knowing what might happen?"
"She wasn't expecting to die. She was afraid because she knew what it was like to grow up around grief."
I looked at the sentence again.
Tell him I trusted him.
At the hospital, I'd watched Mary's face while the doctors talked.
I'd waited for someone to offer another answer.
Then she'd squeezed my hand.
"The girls. Obviously the girls."
I'd thought the squeeze was goodbye.
Now I wondered if she'd been telling me something else.
I trust you.
Not to choose for her.
To believe the choice she'd already made.
I pressed the paper flat.
"She told you not to disappear."
"I know."
"You promised her."
"Yes."
"And when I sent you pictures of her daughters, you wrote two words."
