Chapter 74

Chapter 74

Mira’s POV

We stayed for two hours.

Flora made us tea in the community center kitchen, her hands moving around the small space with a quiet familiarity that suggested she’d made peace with this borrowed life long before she’d started remembering the real one. 

She set three mugs down, sat across from me and kept looking at my face the way you looked at something you were afraid would disappear if you stopped watching it.

Zara, to her eternal credit, said almost nothing.
Which for Zara was basically a spiritual achievement.

“Tell me about yourself,” Flora said. 

I talked.

Not everything. Not the strip club or the stepfather she left me or the hospital visits or the days currently sitting like a countdown in the back of my head. Just the surface of me, the parts that didn’t require explanation or apology—how I’d built a life from nothing, the job, Zara, the city.

Flora listened with her mug held in both hands.

“You’re strong,” she said quietly when I paused.

“I had to be,” I replied.

Something crossed her face. A shadow of something that looked uncomfortably close to guilt.

“I used to dream about you,” she said carefully. “Before the memories started coming back properly. There was a little girl who smelled like the coconut shampoo I kept on the second shelf of the bathroom cabinet.” She looked at her mug. “I didn’t know what the dream meant for a long time.”

My throat tightened.

“Strawberry,” I said.

She looked up.

“It was strawberry shampoo,” I told her. “Not coconut. You always got them mixed up because the bottles were the same color.”

Something in her face shifted completely, like a door swinging open.

“Strawberry,” she repeated softly, and her eyes filled again.

Zara made a sound beside me that she disguised as a cough, fooling absolutely nobody.


We left when the morning volunteers started wrapping up.

Flora walked us to the door with the careful movements of someone navigating something precious, and at the threshold she stopped and held both my hands in hers and looked at me with eyes that were clearer now than when we’d arrived, like the last two hours had been doing quiet work in the background.

“Will you come back?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said immediately.

“Soon?”

“Very soon.” I squeezed her hands. “There are things I need to tell you. Things that couldn’t fit in one morning.”

She nodded, and I could tell she understood there was more to that sentence than its surface.

“I have things to tell you too,” she said quietly. “Things I’ve been remembering that I don’t fully understand yet.” She paused. “About your father.”

Everything in me went still.

“We’ll talk,” I said carefully. “When I come back. We’ll talk about all of it.”

She pulled me into one more hug, briefer this time but no less certain, and I stood on the pavement outside a community center in a town I’d never heard of and held onto my mother who had been dead for years and wasn’t.

Then we got in the car.

Zara drove for ten full minutes before she said anything.

“I’m not crying,” she announced.

“You’re absolutely crying.”

“It’s allergies.”

“You don’t have allergies.”

“I developed them,” she replied, wiping her face aggressively with the back of her hand. “Today. Just now. Brand new allergies.” She exhaled. “Mira.”

“I know.”

“She remembered the shampoo.”

“I know, Zara.”

“She held your hands the whole time we were leaving, did you notice that? She just—” She stopped and swallowed. “She wasn’t ready to let go.”

I looked out the window at Millhaven sliding past and felt something settle in my chest that had been unsettled for so long I’d forgotten what the other thing felt like.

Not fixed. Not resolved.

But present. Something was present that hadn’t been there this morning.

My phone buzzed.

It was Alejandro.

Dro: How did it go?

I looked at the message for a long moment. Then I typed back.

Me: She remembered the shampoo.

His reply came fast.

Dro: That’s everything.

I stared at those two words.

Zara glanced over. “Him?”

“Yes.”

She looked back at the road. “And how does that feel?”

I thought about it honestly.

“Complicated,” I said.

“Still?”

“More than before actually.”

She nodded slowly. “Because he found her.”

“Because he found her,” I confirmed quietly.

Zara drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.
“And Ace offered you the surgery money this morning,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So one man found your mother and another man is paying to keep you alive.”

“That’s a reductive way of putting it.”

“It’s an accurate way of putting it,” she replied. “And somewhere in the middle of all that accuracy you have to figure out what you actually feel.” She glanced over briefly. “Not what you owe anyone. Not what makes logical sense. What you actually feel.”

I didn’t answer.

Because the honest answer was sitting somewhere I hadn’t fully looked yet, and looking at it properly would require more courage than I currently had available.

My chest tightened once, low and quiet.

In a few days, I had to find a way to stay alive first, I reminded myself. Everything else after.

But Zara’s question sat in the car with us the whole drive home.

Waiting for me to be brave enough to look at it properly.

Then my thoughts travelled back to what Flora had said about my real father and a chill ran through my body.

I had never known the man. Each time I asked Flora she had always brushed it off or told me he didn’t deserve us.

I desperately wanted a father so badly, I had thought my stepfather, her ex husband was the one but from the day he begun looking at me in an ill manner, I knew a father’s love was far from what I’ll ever get from that man.

The days he didn’t sexually assault me, he physically abused me. Either ways, I was tortured.

It wouldn’t make a difference to know the looser who abandoned his own family but closure was all I needed in the event that I don’t survive to see the next year.