She held her baby for nine minutes.
Nine.
Then someone took Evelyn away.
“I spent my entire life wondering whether she was cold,” Lenora told me once.
I cried harder at that than I had during my divorce.
I told her about my mother.
How Claire burned toast every Sunday.
How she hated chrysanthemums.
How she sang terribly in the car.
How she had kept every birthday card I ever gave her.
Lenora listened like someone starving.
One afternoon, I brought a box of my mother’s belongings.
At the bottom was a silver locket I had seen my entire childhood.
Lenora gasped when she saw it.
She opened the clasp.
Inside was a tiny photograph of a seventeen-year-old Lenora.
“I gave this to her at the hospital.”
Her hands shook.
“She kept it.”
“She must have known something.”
Lenora kissed the locket.
“Enough to remember.”
That evening, for the first time, I called her Grandma.
She covered her mouth and cried.
A year after the transplant, Lenora summoned me to the original Bromel funeral home.
It had operated since 1911.
Dark wood.
Stained glass.
Quiet hallways smelling faintly of lilies and polish.
Talia was waiting in the upstairs conference room.
So was a representative from the family trust.
