I watched them fall apart in front of me, and I felt nothing but a quiet sense of closure.
The girl who had stumbled in soaked from head to toe, shielding medicine with her body, was a ghost from another life.
I remembered how I had dashed to my mother's side that night and said, "Mom, take your meds quick," while water dripped from my hair onto the floor.
After I had returned home, my mother made a passing remark about her pillow straining her neck, and I stayed up all night sewing a buckwheat neck pillow from scratch, with stitches so precise they looked like piano keys.
Ruth's knees buckled as those memories crashed over her, and she collapsed to the floor like a marionette with cut strings.
She remembered organizing the closet just last month and noticing the frayed cuff on her fa
