I was nine.
She was thirty-four.
We were sitting on the dock at Lake Norman, our bare feet hanging above the water.
Mom had turned partly away from the camera.
Her bathing suit exposed her left shoulder blade.
And there it was.
The scar.
Three crooked lines.
She’d gotten it when she was seventeen after falling through the glass door of her parents’ greenhouse.
I remembered asking her about it every summer.
She used to trace the lines and tell me, “That’s my little constellation.”
