My mother walks through the safehouse door at six forty-three in the morning.
She is carrying her shoes in one hand, heels, which she removed for the walk, because my mother is a practical woman and she has a bruise forming at her left temple that she is pretending does not exist, and she looks at me across the safehouse kitchen with the same expression she has had at every significant moment of my life: composed, present, slightly ahead of whatever the room thinks is happening.
I cross to her in three steps and I put my arms around her and she puts hers around me and neither of us speaks for a long moment. She smells like the violet soap she has used my entire life and something else, adrenaline, the specific alkaline edge of it and she is shaking slightly, very slightly, the controlle
