I heard the side gate.
A young woman was standing at the edge of my yard.
My brain did something it has never done before and hasn’t done since. It stopped mid-process. Stopped reasoning and comparing and cataloguing and simply presented me with one raw, impossible perception.
She looked exactly like Lily.
***
The same dark eyes. The same slight tilt of the head when uncertain. The same way of standing with her weight shifted slightly forward, ready to move but not yet moving.
She looked exactly like Lily.
She was too young, clearly, twenty or twenty-five at most, which made no sense and also made the whole moment worse somehow.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Ashley,” she said. “I think you knew my mother.”
She held out a tablet.
“What happened at the river thirty years ago,” she revealed softly, “was a lie. Please. You need to see this.”
