I scratch the cat behind his ears. “Hey, Nacho,” I tell him, and he rubs his head against my side. I wonder if he thinks I’m my mom, finally come back after all this time.

Glory points at a framed photo that sits on a little end table beside the couch, so I reach over to pick it up. I’m sitting under a tree with my mother, and we both have ice cream cones. Mine is chocolate, and it’s running down my chin. Dripping down my arm.

And the two of us are laughing.

I just stare at that photo for a few seconds. It feels like such a punch in the gut to know that, while I was down in Texas not knowing anything about my mother, or about myself, really—all those long, hungry years—there was someone up here in Connecticut with a framed picture of us on her living room end table.

Proof that we ate ice cream together.

And that we laughed.

That somebody loved us.

“I have more pictures,” Glory says. “If you want to see them.” I nod, and Glory gets up to pull a cardboard box out of the closet. She takes the lid off and rifles through it until she finds what she’s looking for. “Here,” she says, and she hands me a stack of photos. “These are mostly you and Cole. You both spent so much time with me that summer.”

I shuffle through the stack. A little blonde girl and a little dark-haired boy.

Swinging in the park.

Building sandcastles at the beach.

Sitting on the floor behind Glory’s desk. Surrounded by paper and crayons.

“Here are some more of Nicki,” Glory tells me. “God.” She sighs as she hands me the pictures. “Sometimes it still knocks the wind out of me, seeing her.” She smiles at me. “Look how beautiful she was.” She sighs. “But she was so much more than that, too. The way her brain worked. The ideas that just came into her head.” Glory smiles a genuine smile. “I’ve never met anyone else with that kind of raw creative energy.”

I’m thumbing through the images. My mother on the farmhouse porch. In the library again. With that laptop. And then standing waist-deep in the sound. She’s wearing a neon-green bikini top.

But I stop when I come to a picture of my mother with Brody Culver. It’s just the two of them. The photo was taken in the barn theatre. They’re sitting in folding chairs under the stage lights. Heads close together. Like they’re telling secrets.

The photo makes me feel sick. I stare at it for a few seconds before I decide that I have to know. And there’s less than a week left, so I don’t have time to tiptoe anymore.