“Your mother was a lovely woman,” he said as he opened my door.
I paused.
“You knew her?”
He smiled gently.
“I drove for her sometimes when she came down for winter. She talked about you often.”
The mention of my mother caught me off guard.
“What did she say?”
“That you were stronger than you knew.”
I looked away quickly.
Some sentences arrived exactly when a person needed them and still hurt.
The condo was just as I remembered.
White walls. Blue shutters. Terracotta pots on the balcony. The faint smell of lemon cleaner and sea air.
My mother’s framed watercolor still hung in the hallway: three small boats on pale water. She had painted it after my father died, during the year she said grief made every color brighter and harder to look at.
Lily ran straight to the blue room. Noah followed, pretending not to be excited and failing completely.
