All these things were true, but when Betsy died, I’d lost my strongest tie to the girl I’d been before my marriage. I had no reason to visit my old neighborhood since my mom’s move. Perhaps I’d gotten soft, spoiled. These days Marshall sure treated me as if he thought I was an overpampered deb. But I hoped she’d see the girl I used to be. That girl was likely not too different from her own child. I waited, barely breathing, until she answered.

“I did that Goodwill trick, too. When my daughter was small.”

I felt the cord of connection thicken between us.

I sat back down at the vanity, the bracelet chafing me. The haunted rag doll I had picked up off the floor was gone, replaced by a pretty woman with high cheekbones and a glossy, pale mouth.

Trey loved me in a short dress and heels. If he were here, ready to take me to the party in his tuxedo, if everything were normal, he would dance me around, singing “Wonderful Tonight.” How was it that my baby was missing and yet I could still make this woman in the mirror smile? It even lit her eyes.

Theatre, I thought, though I’d gotten married less than a year after college graduation. I’d been in exactly one professional play, at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, winning the role of Syl in Traps over pros with Equity and SAG cards. I’d done it to prove that marrying Trey instead of going to New York was my actual choice, not simply fear that I didn’t have what it took. Now I was grateful for every play I’d ever done, every class I’d taken, every workshop, because they let me be two things at once: a howling mother-monster, mad with fear, and this bold-eyed, smiling woman.

Or maybe the training and the practice didn’t matter. This was my child. Tiny little women picked cars up off their babies. They sold their bodies. They killed. They died. I could smile at a goddamn party and get a spiked drink down a man who loved a cocktail.

“You sure look like you belong. I seen your car. Your shoes. You walk like you own everything you see.” As she talked, Robert woke up. All at once it became so hard to concentrate. I heard him sigh, and then the little noises he made while stretching. “Just a minute.”

I heard the clunk of the phone onto a hard surface. A dashboard? Robert fussed, and she was talking to him in a comforting murmur that ebbed and flowed as she rustled around. Then, in a place far from me, off a highway in a car that I could not imagine, I could hear Robert eating.