(Amelia)
Five years is long enough to become someone else, if you work at it, and I had worked at it harder than I'd ever worked at anything.
I came back to New York a different woman than the one who'd folded her whole life into two cases and boarded a plane before dawn. That woman had been a placeholder, a wife nobody chose, a coat holder. The woman who stepped off the plane now was Dr. Amelia Carter, whose name meant something in her field, whose research had changed how three countries treated a certain kind of cardiac trauma in newborns. I hadn't planned to become known. I'd only planned to survive. But grief makes a good engine if you point it at work, and I'd pointed all of mine at the one thing that had never failed me.
I hadn't come back alone.
"Mom." A tug on my sleeve at the
