Chapter 4

In the mirror sat an old woman.

White hair, loose eyelids, age spots scattered across her throat.

I blinked, and the woman in the mirror blinked too. I raised my right hand, and she raised hers.

I stared at the glass, something lodged in my throat.

"Who are you?"

The moment the words left me, the memories came back.

Forty-some years of forgotten memory came flooding back into my mind all at once.

I remembered the first day in the hospital, Susan holding me through an episode, crying, "Mom, it's just cataract surgery, don't be scared."

I remembered the pills I took every day, donepezil hydrochloride, medication for dementia.

And I remembered what my life had truly been, from the age of nineteen on.

The year I turned twenty-two, my mother was diagnosed with leukemia.

No suitable donor ever turned up in the registry, until the Henson family came to us on their own, and only then did I learn that my mother had given birth to a pair of twins when she was young.

When she fled the Hensons, she took two-year-old me with her, and left the other daughter behind.

That daughter was Joyce Henson. Joyce was a match for my mother, but she named a condition.

"You want the Henson heir to donate for your mother? Fine. Then hand Denys Sanchez over to me, and marry me off with him."

I refused. My mother refused too.

But Denys signed that loyal-dog contract behind my back.

He told me it was only a stopgap, that once my mother's condition stabilized, he would set everything right.

The year I turned twenty-three, we held our wedding without telling Joyce.

She stormed into the hall in a red gown and snapped my bridal bouquet in two.

Joyce slapped that contract down on the table.

"Have you forgotten what you signed? You actually dared to marry her in secret?"

The Hensons tore off my veil, stripped away my wedding dress, and put the bridal flowers from my chest into Joyce's hands.

When Denys helped me up, he murmured, "Bear it a little longer. Save your mother first."

And in that moment, I actually believed him.

Later, I accepted Joyce's marrow.

And I accepted her definition of what we were: she was Denys's rightful wife, and I was the lover who could never see the light.

At twenty-five, I got pregnant and gave birth. The day my water broke, Denys was throwing Joyce a birthday party.

He didn't come. He only sent his assistant with a signed surgical consent form.

Save the baby. Remove the uterus if necessary.

My body was never whole again after that.

When my daughter was a year and a half, my mother didn't make it after all.

After the funeral, Denys and Joyce ended their brief marriage. He came to my mother's grave with a plain band, knelt on one knee, and proposed to me, saying this was the standing he owed me.

I thought that after all those years of waiting, he had finally come back.

But the day we went to register, the moment we walked out of the office, one call from Joyce and he left me and our daughter standing at the roadside.

When our daughter was two and a half and hospitalized with pneumonia, he promised to stay the night, then left in the middle of it because Joyce's child couldn't sleep.

I went to a parent-child event at her school, and the teacher asked why the child's father never showed up.

On the phone, Denys said, "The Henson occasions matter more. Grow up a little. Don't use the kid to fight for attention."

On our wedding anniversary, he ordered me wonton soup from the little diner on South Street, and went out of town with Joyce himself.

When the delivery arrived, the note read: Don't wait for me.

Every time, he left something behind.

A meal, a card, one more bear it a little longer.

As if those things were enough to fill the space he left when he walked out.

When our daughter was almost three, he finally told me that he and Joyce had grown close over time.

"Let's divorce for now. Once I have control of the Hensons, once it's all over, I'll come back for you."

The divorce papers he wanted, I traded to him on one condition: that he spend our daughter's third birthday with her.

After that, he pulled himself out of our lives bit by bit.

First fewer visits, then he stopped the money, and in the end he took back the house he had once given us.

I delivered food, worked temp jobs, raised my daughter alone, and changed her surname from Sanchez back to Harding.

Every year after that, on Susan's birthday, I would send him one line:

Can you come back and have a meal with her?

His answer was always the same:

Bear it a little longer.

That bearing lasted more than thirty years.

He finally finished settling the Henson shares and took the chairman's seat at the Hensons.

And I had long since finished settling every expectation I ever had of him.

In the mirror, my face was wet with tears.

Susan crouched down and buried her face against my knees. She no longer called me her patient, no longer called me ma'am.

"Mom."

Just that one word, and her shoulders shook with sobbing.

I felt for the little fleshy mole behind her ear, the one she'd had since birth.

Afraid the nurse might mix her up with another baby, I used to check for it every single day.

"Susie."

Her crying stopped short for an instant, then she held me tighter.

Denys stood a few steps away.

He had grown old, the mole at the corner of his left eye faded paler now, his back no longer straight.

That dark gray coat was the color I'd loved most on him at nineteen.

But when I looked at him now, there was nothing left inside me.

"That story about traveling back from forty years in the future was a lie."

His lips moved.

"I was afraid you wouldn't see me."

"You guessed right."

Denys took a step forward. I raised my hand to stop him.

"I used to always wait. Wait for you to finish with Joyce, wait for you to get what you wanted, wait for you to come back when it was convenient."

I braced myself against the mirror and stood.

My legs were shaking, but my voice was steady.

"There's no need to wait anymore."

"Denys, go."

"From now on, in life or in death, we don't meet again."