“I miss her,” says Caroline, and that’s the reason “away” could never quite be forever, could never come with changing her name or moving to another coast. Family is where you keep the pieces of yourself that need to be shared with someone else if they’re going to have meaning, the memories that must be seen from three or four different angles at the same time before they find their context. She’s been circling her parents since she left, never coming close enough to catch, never stepping far enough away to escape, because these are the people who remember where she comes from, who understand who she is when she’s alone.

“I miss her too,” says her mother, and then, “I miss you. We both do. I’m sorry we aren’t always perfect together. Do you think we could try again, for your sake? For Anastasia?”

Caroline hesitates.

She’s tired. She’s tired of couches, and shitty little apartments with roaches in the walls, and motels that are as happy to rent by the hour as they are by the week. She doesn’t mind the sex workers—they’re sweet ladies, for the most part, and some of them have kids of their own; she’s made her rent more than once by providing babysitting services to glamorous escorts in mended silk skirts and sky-high shoes—but the druggies, they’re a problem. She doesn’t want them around the baby. And how many couches are going to be open to her now that her daughter is out in the open, wailing and puking and messing her diapers, instead of peacefully tucked away inside her belly?

I should have kept you inside forever, where you’d be safe, she thinks, and she’s righter than she will ever have the chance to know.

“It can’t be like it was,” she says. “Not this time. I’m a mother now. I have to be allowed to know what’s best for my little girl.”

“As long as you’ll let me help,” says her mother. Her father, who has no competition in sight for the position of most important man in Anastasia’s life, says nothing. This part of the conversation isn’t for him, and he’s a clever-enough man to know it, to understand that sometimes the right thing to do is stand back and hold his peace.

“I think I could use some help,” says Caroline, and holds out her arms, asking for her mother, asking for her daughter, asking for her family.

Renee Miller, who raised three children of her own, only to lose them all—one to a war, one to the other side of the country, and one, her precious baby girl, to her own stubbornness—walks her granddaughter across the room, and it’s like she’s coming home, and it’s like she never left.