I closed my eyes.
Mam had not left the key to punish me.
She had not written the letter to win an argument after death.
She had prepared the box because she understood something about me before I understood it myself.
I had already inherited the habit.
I simply had not noticed.
When Aoife was small, I watched from the front window until she reached the school corner.
At birthday parties, I waited in the car park until I saw her enter the building.
When she began taking the bus alone, I stood beneath the shelter until the doors closed and the bus pulled away.
I told myself I was checking that she was safe.
But I always waited until she was completely gone.
Mam had seen me do it.
The realization did not absolve me.
It made my cruelty worse.
I had mocked in her the same instinct I protected in myself.
Aoife returned the photographs to the box.
“Can we go outside?” she asked.
The rain had stopped.
Evening light lay across the wet road, turning each shallow puddle silver.
We walked down the path together.
The gate was still open.
Mam had always kept it painted, though rust had begun to show near the hinges.
I placed my hand where hers had rested three weeks earlier.
The iron was cold.
From that spot, I could see the first bend in the road.
Beyond it, hedges hid everything.
No wonder she had remained there.
The person leaving disappeared quickly.
The person watching had only seconds.
Aoife stood on the road facing me.
“Pretend I’m going,” she said.
My throat tightened.
“Why?”
“I want to know what she saw.”
She walked backward a few steps, then turned and continued toward the bend.
Halfway there, she looked over her shoulder.
I raised my hand.
She waved.
For one impossible instant, she was six years old again, wearing a yellow school coat and carrying a bag almost as large as her body.
Then she was sixteen, tall and serious, already moving toward a life I could not enter for her.
She reached the bend.
Instead of turning, she stopped.
“Are you going inside?” she called.
“No.”
“How long will you stand there?”
The answer came before I could think.
“Until you’re gone.”
Aoife smiled, but I began to cry.
Not loudly.
Not with the dramatic collapse I might once have expected from grief.
Tears simply moved down my face while my hand remained on the gate.
Aoife ran back and wrapped her arms around me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She knew I was not speaking to her.
We stood there until the evening cold drove us inside.
In the weeks that followed, I read Mam’s letter so often that the folds began to weaken.
