CLARA'S POV,
Five years is both a very long time and not long at all.
It is long enough to build something; a career, a reputation, a life with its own weight and texture and history. Long enough for a child to become a person, distinct and specific and astonishing in the ways that people become astonishing when you have watched them grow from nothing. Long enough to stop flinching at your own reflection when it answers to a name you chose.
It is not long enough to forget. But forgetting, I had come to understand, was not the point. The point was to carry the past in a way that didn't make it the structure you lived inside to hold it without being held by it, to know it without letting it speak first in every room you entered.
I had become reasonably good at this.
Not perfect. But re
