“Mm-hm,” she said, looking out at the mountains as she took a long drag. “So,” she asked through the white exhalation of her holographic smoke, “what do you want to know?”

The winter of Mom, as I came to call it, was the year Nostalgia made a comeback. Nin, Dad, and I were merely the crest of a larger wave. Retirement homes held Reunion Socials where seniors danced with long-lost loved ones, and the news ran human-interest stories, showing clips of widowers twerking by themselves in ballrooms. Around town, men sat on park benches having conversations with lost buddies. And at Whole Foods, a woman was cooing to her shopping cart. When I reached past her for a jar of tomato sauce, she looked at me sheepishly. “My son’s a teenager now,” she explained. “I miss his toddler years.”

Nostalgia had finally become what it’d always been meant for—a way to help us cope—and Mom’s return to my life didn’t seem strange or pathetic, like my holographic sex sessions of yesteryear, but rather a way to reconnect with her. In the evenings, before Theo got home, Mom and I would sit together on the back porch, and she shared an inner life with me that she’d never shown to anyone in our family.

“Did you know I went to Italy?” she asked. “It was a wild decision—my dorm mate and I found cheap tickets and a small hotel in Sicily. Your grandparents hated the idea, but I went anyway. There was a vineyard—the family had owned it for hundreds of years—we ate cured olives and drank Chianti, and there was a cute boy who worked in the winery. I drank a whole bottle of wine with him in the fields one night. We were free, and tipsy, and full of life. He said he loved me, and in those rows of grapevines we kissed all through the summer nights. He had these gorgeous brown curls and deep dark eyes. The night before I left Italy, I snuck into his room at the villa and we held each other until the blue light of morning leaked in his window. Oh, Leah, I shouldn’t be telling you this; you must be mortified.”

“Mom, it’s okay. Really, I’m not embarrassed.” Which was true. Even though it was my mother sitting there, I knew I was glimpsing someone else. Someone full of passion and hope. A woman who had nothing to do with me, or Nin, or Dad.