A dozen thoughts collide in my mind once we’re off the stage and standing with all the recipients, awaiting a group photo, but that’s the one I blurt out. I presented several other awards after Ezra’s, but I couldn’t tell you any of the recipients’ names. I don’t remember their faces. On autopilot, I presented the awards and smiled and posed, but all the while, I knew exactly where Ezra stood with the others behind me onstage. I could feel his stare—the heat and intensity of it tingling across the bare skin of my neck. As soon as all the awards were announced, I wasn’t surprised when Ezra immediately appeared at my side.

“Of sorts,” he replies to my question, shrugging. “Ed.D.”

“Daddy!” The shout comes from the boy who is bigger and more like Ezra than the first time I saw him at the funeral. Noah throws his arms around his father, burying his face in his side. “You won.”

“It wasn’t a competition, son,” Ezra says dryly, brushing a hand over his hair.

“I tried to explain,” says an attractive woman around our age with dreadlocks pulled into a regal arrangement just behind Noah. “But he wasn’t having it. You’re a winner in his eyes.”

I remember Ezra’s wife vividly, a petite woman of Asian ancestry. This woman doesn’t look anything like that, but she does look vaguely familiar.

“All that squinting,” she says, turning laughing dark eyes on me. “And you still haven’t figured out who I am?”

“We have met, right?” I ask, hating to admit I don’t recognize someone, but too curious to pretend.

“He was Jack,” she says, nodding to Ezra. “You were Chrissy, and I was—”

“Janet!” I shout, pulling her into a fierce hug. “Oh my God, Mona.”

Tears prick my eyes, and I’m probably holding her too tight, but I’m overcome with how good it feels to see her again. When her parents decided she wouldn’t bus into our district for high school, we kept in touch at first, but didn’t maintain the friendship, caught up in new schools, new friends, and all the changes that came with growing up and inevitably growing apart. Eventually, with Ezra and Mona both gone, I found a new circle of friends, and so did she. I heard snatches of news about her until I left for college, and then nothing—until now.

“I’ll let you off the hook because it’s been so long since we saw each other,” Mona says, pulling away to look me up and down. “Well, that and you gave us one of the best presidents this country has seen in recent memory. Congratulations, Kimba. When I saw you on CNN, I couldn’t believe you were the same girl who hated reading out loud in class.”