The second thing I lost was not a word this time. It was a face.
I woke in the gray hour before dawn certain that someone had visited me in my dreams, someone important, someone whose voice I could still hear faintly if I concentrated, warm and familiar and achingly close. But when I tried to picture her, there was nothing there. Not blurred, not distant. Simply absent, the way a shape disappears when you stop tracing it in the sand.
It took me long minutes of lying still in the dark, my heart hammering, before I understood who I had lost.
My mother's face.
I had spent six years holding onto the shape of her, the exact color of her eyes, the particular way her mouth curved when she was trying not to laugh at something she found foolish. I had built my entire hidden life around the memo
