“But Tilly,” Mom says, touching the comforter with her fingertips, “my mother didn’t brush feelings away. She sank into them, and sometimes so deeply that it scared me. I think that’s why I made every effort not to be like her.”

“She had regrets too,” I tell Mom. “But she called you a superhero.”

Mom looks at me, half her face in shadow.

“When you showed up,” Mom says, her voice rocky, “you stole her heart. I remember talking to her while you slept one night. I was so afraid of making a mistake with you that I was just about paralyzed. But Mom grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘Nia, when you find a child you can save, you don’t overthink it. You save her or you lose yourself.’”

Mom once described Tilly as a roller-coaster mother. If what I saw were the highs, I can only imagine what the lows were like.

“I wonder if I should have asked you more about your parents, your brother. I thought I’d be pushing you into uncomfortable places, but now I think I might have been sparing myself.”

I consider this. We both deserve more than coddling answers right now.

“You did the best you could. You’re not to blame,” I say. “I . . . I really hate the way I tried to keep them deep in me. It’s my fault too that I couldn’t hold on to them better.”

“Sweetheart, you were just a child then.”

We were all something different then—even Shair.

“Do you think I should forgive Shair?” I ask.

“That’s not for me to decide,” Mom replies. “And I’m more interested in you forgiving yourself. You have carried around this guilt because you made it out and they didn’t. You did nothing wrong. You have held them in your heart and become an amazing person in their honor. I hope, no matter what happens on this trip, that you’ll believe that and give yourself a break. You deserve to be happy and loved.”

Mom rises and disappears into the bathroom. While the pipes whistle, then shirr with the flow of water, I take a moment to think about what I deserve.

I'll confess, I have craved romance, the kind I saw when my father would sing off-key love tunes to my mother and she would hide her smile, her flushing cheeks. There is a single quatrain from the Shahnameh embedded in my mind, as out of place there as a chandelier in a cave.

So tightly they embraced, before Zal left,

Zal was the warp, and Rudabeh the weft

Of one cloth, as with tears they said goodbye

And cursed the sun for rising in the sky.

I’ve always believed that if I just worked hard enough, practiced enough, insisted enough, anything would be possible—even some form of love.