I walk across the room and look at the picture screen on my wall as it scrolls through the images I’ve uploaded over the years. Mom with her hair pulled back in a knot and secured with her tapered paintbrush—her screen balanced on her lap as she sits on a rock, staring out at Lake Michigan. I took the picture the previous summer. It was the last time I remember all three of us going to the lake together, only Mom said she was tired and that she just wanted to sit in the sun and draw while Dad and I walked on the beach. I offered to draw with her, but she said watching me struggle would just be a distraction from her own work and I didn’t think twice about walking away.

For years she said I was talented. She applauded even my worst efforts and told me, when I got frustrated, that all artists had to learn to walk before they ran.

Then something changed.

Mom grew distant. She brushed aside my work or suggested I should try to draw easier subjects. The stool in her studio—the one she bought for me to use—was put in the back corner and she asked about my work less and less.

Dad said the change was because I was getting older. Mom knew how hard it was to get accepted into the university programs and hired by the government. Her friends at work were seeing their own kids get crushed because they were turned down. Only the best of the best made it into the university arts programs, and those who didn’t were forced to put their art aside and find a new vocation. Mom wasn’t sure I was improving enough and didn’t want me to be left adrift because I wasn’t talented enough to be selected.

But what if Dad was wrong? What if there was more to it than that? What if Mom was trying to hide who she had become and the things she was doing from both of us? There are so many things I clearly don’t understand.

A hollow ache builds in the center of my chest. I wrap my arms tight around myself and stare at my mother’s face—eyes pinched close together—mouth pursed tight, but turned up slightly on the edges, as if amused by something only she could see. Did I lose my mother in that car accident or was she already gone long before she died? Not knowing is like losing her all over. I shouldn’t have to feel that kind of loss again. And yet . . . here I am.

I turn my back on the pictures scrolling on my screen and pace across the room. Mr. Webster made me promise to come to him with any questions I have, but I can’t risk telling him about my mother’s paintings. Which means the only way to learn exactly who I lost in that accident is to find the answers on my own.