Chapter 73

Chapter 73


Mira’s POV

Zara talked for the first forty minutes of the drive.

Not about anything important, which was deliberate and I knew it, just a continuous stream of commentary about the other drivers and the road signs and a podcast she’d been listening to about true crime that had apparently ruined her ability to trust anyone who owned a boat.

I let her talk. It was better than the alternative, which was sitting in silence with nothing between me and the full weight of what I was driving toward.

“You’ve gone quiet,” she said eventually.

“I’ve been quiet the whole time.”

“You’ve been a different kind of quiet for the last ten minutes.” She glanced over briefly. “The scary kind.”

I looked out the window at the motorway moving beneath us.

“What if she doesn’t know me?” I asked.

Zara was quiet for a second. “Then you introduce yourself.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It wasn’t a joke,” she replied simply. “If she doesn’t remember you then you start from the beginning. You tell her who you are and you let her figure out the rest.” There was a pause. “She’s your mum, Mira. Memory or not, she’s still that.”

I pressed my fingers against my mouth briefly.

“And if she looks at me like a stranger?” I said quietly.

“Then you look right back,” Zara replied, “and you remind her.”



Millhaven was smaller than I expected.

The kind of town that existed comfortably without needing anyone’s attention, clean streets, low buildings and the specific unhurried pace of somewhere that had never been in a rush about anything. Reeves’ information had given us an address, a small community center where Flora apparently volunteered on Thursday mornings.

It was Thursday thankfully.

Alejandro had planned that detail without saying so, which I’d only realized at 6am when I’d checked the file again and seen the schedule attached.

We parked across the street and I looked at the building through the windscreen.

“I can’t move,” I announced.

“Yes you can,” Zara replied.

“My legs aren’t working.”

“They’re working fine. You’re scared.” She turned to face me fully. “Which is completely reasonable given that your dead mother is approximately forty meters away. I’d be concerned if you weren’t frozen.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“I’m not trying to be helpful, I’m trying to be accurate.” She reached over and squeezed my hand once, hard. “You’ve survived things that would have destroyed other people. You can walk forty meters.”

I looked at her.

“What if—”

“Mira.” Her voice was firm but gentle. “Get out of the car.”

I got out of the car.



The community center smelled like coffee and fresh paint, a large open room with round tables and a small kitchen area along one wall where two women were arranging cups and a third was wiping down surfaces with her back turned to us.

A woman at the reception desk looked up. “Can I help you?”

“We’re just—” I started, my voice coming out wrong, too thin. “We’re looking for someone. Flora. Flora Reyes.”

The receptionist smiled. “Oh, Flora’s just in the kitchen. Give me one second.”

She stood and moved toward the kitchen area and said something I couldn’t hear, and the woman wiping the counter stilled.

Then she turned around.

Everything stopped.

She was thinner than the photograph, than my memory, than the version of her I’d been carrying for years. Her hair was cut short and there were lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before and she was wearing a green apron that said the community center’s name across the front.

But her face.

Her face was my face in thirty years, and I felt that recognition move through me so completely that my eyes started doing things before I had given them any instruction.

She looked at me from across the room.

Something flickered in her expression. It was there for a second and gone, like a light that almost caught.

The receptionist said something to her, then she nodded and walked toward us, drying her hands on her apron. I stood absolutely still because moving felt like something that might break whatever was happening.

She stopped in front of me.

Up close her eyes were exactly as I remembered them. Dark and deep-set and slightly tired in a way that had always been there, the permanent tiredness of a woman who had worked hard her whole life.

“Hello,” she said carefully. “I’m Flora. Can I help you?”

Her voice.

I had forgotten how her voice sounded and remembered it completely at the same moment, and something in my chest cracked so cleanly and so completely that I couldn’t speak for several seconds.

“My name is Mira,” I said finally. “Mira Martinez.”

Something crossed her face. Not recognition exactly. Something more like the feeling of recognition, the shadow of it, moving through her expression like something trying to surface from deep water.

“Mira,” she repeated slowly, like she was testing the weight of it.

“Yes.”

Her brows pulled together slightly. “Why do I—” She stopped. Pressed her fingers briefly to her temple. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to forgive me. I have some gaps in my memory from an accident I had. Sometimes faces or names—” She paused again, something shifting in her expression. “Where are you from?”

“I grew up in Clearwater,” I told her. “On Heston Street. Number forty two. There was a red door that you painted yourself because the landlord refused to do it and you said if you had to look at that door every day it was going to be a color that made you happy.”

Flora went very still.

“The door was red,” she said quietly, almost to herself.

“Yes.”

“And there was a—” She stopped breathing for a second. “A crack in the kitchen window that let in cold air in winter and I used to tape over it every November with masking tape and it never worked.”

“Never,” I confirmed, and my voice broke entirely on that single word.

Her eyes filled.

“I don’t—” She pressed her hand against her mouth. “I’m sorry, I don’t fully—my memory isn’t—” Her voice fractured. “But I know that door. I know that window. I know—”

She reached out and touched my face with both hands, cupping it the way she had when I was small, tilting it up toward the light, and looked at me with an expression that was part recognition, part grief and part something so raw it barely had a name.

“You have my hands,” she whispered.

I couldn’t speak.

“I have dreams sometimes,” she said, barely audible now. “About a little girl. She has my hands and she—” 

Her voice broke. “She calls me Mum.”

“She does,” I managed.

Flora looked at me for one long trembling second.

Then she pulled me into her arms and held on with the specific desperate grip of someone who had been trying to remember something for so long and had just found it standing in front of them in a green community center apron.

I held her back with everything I had.

Behind me, very quietly, I heard Zara make a sound she would absolutely deny making later.

We stood there for a long time. And when Flora finally pulled back to look at my face again, something in her eyes was different. Clearer. Like a room where someone had just opened all the windows at once.

“Mira,” she said softly. Not a question this time.

“Hi Mum,” I whispered.

Her face crumpled completely.

And so did mine.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​