“And I remember you, too, of course,” Glory adds, smiling at me. “Your mother used to leave you with me while she was in rehearsal. You’d just sit on the floor and color for hours. You were never a bit of trouble. Everybody adored you. That snow-white hair and that curious expression on your face.” She stops filing and looks at me for a few long seconds. “I knew even back then that you’d grow up to look like her.” She pauses. Blinks. “Nicki was so beautiful, you know. Just luminous. But there was this sadness about her that summer, too.” She goes back to the filing. “I guess that was partly because of the trouble with your dad.”

I stop with a paper halfway in the file drawer. “Trouble with my dad?” I’m thinking about that almost-imperceptible frown of Willa’s. The one I saw yesterday. Her fleeting disapproval.

“I figured you knew.” Glory’s face turns bright red. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it, I guess. It’s not my place. But I think there was some kind of trouble there. Or at least, that was my impression.” She reaches for her water bottle. Takes a long drink. “That’s what Nicki was doing up here that summer, I think. She was trying to put some space between the two of them.”

Dad’s never mentioned anything about that, but then he barely mentions my mother at all. He told me she came up here because Willa practically begged her to take a role in one of Brody’s shows that summer. They were on the brink of going bankrupt, he told me, and they needed her because she’d work for almost nothing. A favor for an old college friend.

Glory looks down at her polka dot skirt. She smooths it with her hands and fiddles with the hem. “What do you remember?” she asks. “About that summer.”

I shake my head. “I don’t remember anything.”

She’s staring at me now. “Nothing?” I shake my head again. “Well,” she says, “you were so young. I just thought—”

“I don’t remember anything before that, either.”

She’s really staring at me now. “So you don’t have any memories of your mom?” I shake my head and Glory gasps. There are suddenly tears in her eyes.

And I come so close to spilling it all right then. How that lack of memory haunts me. How I’ve spent my whole life tiptoeing around that deep hole and trying not to fall in. How I lie awake at night trying to remember just one real, concrete thing. The sound of her voice. Her touch. The way she smelled. Anything at all.

Because I feel like until I know her, I’ll never really be able to know myself.

But I don’t say any of that. Because if I open up that crack, who knows what might come spilling out.