“Yes, Rand.” Sarah lingered evilly on his name, like some sort of movie villain. “I know it all. The man you cheated with, had Lily with. The man you put your entire family in jeopardy and pain for. That Rand, correct?”

“I know. I’m so sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” Bea set her head on the table in the cradle of her forearms. “I thought you kept his letters from me, and mine from him. I was so wrong.”

Sarah stopped a foot from Bea’s trembling back. Her instinct from years of motherly love—maybe motherly conditioning—was to comfort her, and yet she felt incapable of doing so.

“You should go,” Sarah finally said.

“But doesn’t it matter how sorry I am? How sad I am about what happened to your family?” Bea glanced up. She was crying, yes, but now something like defiance had slipped over her. “It’s what happened to my family too! You should have told me.”

“Perhaps I should have.” Sarah was zapped of it all; the reservoir of strength from which she’d fed all these years now ran dry. “Bea, I am telling you to go.”

Her daughter stumbled to her feet, and for a moment, it pained Sarah—the face a spitting image of Sam’s, now exiled from the home to which they’d brought her from the hospital in a precious pink cap and with enough love that it could have filled oceans.

“You’re mad, I understand it. Mother, I do. But please tell me you won’t stop loving me. Mom…” Bea’s voice broke. “I really can’t have you disappear on me too.”

A part of Sarah swelled and wanted to take her daughter in her arms. She thought about her own mother, and the last time she’d seen her, and the time before that too. But sometimes one had to be a mother, and sometimes one had to be a person. And so Sarah walked to the front door and thrust it open. Today she was a person. She was not a mother. Maybe she’d never be a mother again.

That thought nearly undid her. It occurred to Sarah this was anger talking, this was the pain of losing Milos, of losing her family—of losing Bea too, in some measure. But that was all analytical, and what Sarah felt at her core was an inability to pass one more moment in the presence of her daughter.

“For now, I need some distance, Bea,” she said, her lips trembling. “Please go.”

*  *  *