The woman lifted her face into the porch light.
For five years, I had trained myself not to see Mia everywhere.
Not in women crossing a Boston street with their hair pinned the way she wore hers.
Not in the reflection of a restaurant window.
Not in the shape sleeping beside me during the half-second before I woke and remembered that my bed was empty.
But there was no mistaking the woman behind that door.
The small scar beneath her left eyebrow was still there.
So was the tiny silver stud in her ear.
Her hair was shorter, and fear had sharpened her face, but the eyes staring back at me belonged to the woman whose coffin I had followed through rain.
“Mia.”
Her name came out like something torn from my chest.
She tightened one hand around the door.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
I looked at the little girl standing beside her.
Curly dark hair.
Mia’s mouth.
My brown eyes.
The child clutched the edge of Mia’s sweater and studied me with the solemn suspicion children reserve for strangers who know too much.
“Mom,” she whispered, “who is he?”
Mia moved in front of her.
“Go upstairs, Lily.”
“But—”
“Now.”
The girl flinched at the sharpness in her voice.
She ran toward the staircase, her small feet striking the old wooden boards.
I listened until a door closed above us.
Then I held up the bag of medicine and crushed biscuits I had brought for a woman buried three years earlier.
“Tell me I’m hallucinating.”
Mia glanced past me toward the road.
“Come inside before someone sees you.”
I laughed once.
There was no humor in it.
“Someone already saw me.
Your mother’s neighbor.
The diner owner.
Half this town seems to know more about my wife than I do.”
Rain streamed from my coat onto the threshold.
Mia’s expression changed when I mentioned the diner.
“What did he give you?”
I pulled the old plastic folder from beneath my coat.
Her gaze dropped to it, and the color left her face.
“My identification,” I said.
“My signature.
Copies of the documents your mother asked me for years ago.
You used them to collect the money after she died.”
“I can explain.”
“You can start with the coffin.”
A gust of wind pushed rain through the doorway.
Mia stepped back, and I entered the house where my dead wife had apparently been raising my daughter.
The front room was small but warm.
A child’s red rain boots stood beside the radiator.
Crayon drawings covered one wall, none with words, only houses, waves, and three stick figures beneath a yellow sun.
On a shelf sat a framed photograph of Lily as a baby.
Mia noticed me staring at it and turned the frame facedown.
That single movement hurt more than seeing her alive.
“How old is she?” I asked.
