Same small line between her eyebrows when she was trying to be brave.
Same way of pressing her lips together before saying something that mattered.
“She really did this?” Hannah asked.
I nodded.
“She came here after treatments?”
“Almost every time,” Arthur said gently behind us.
Hannah looked at him.
Her face changed when she saw his prosthetic leg again.
Not pity.
Recognition.
Like she understood that broken things sometimes learned to stand anyway.
Arthur stepped closer, slow enough not to spook Copper.
“Your mother sat right there,” he said, pointing to the dirt outside the pen. “Sometimes she was too weak to stand when she got here. But she wouldn’t go home until Copper came to the fence.”
Hannah covered her mouth.
“She wrote about you constantly,” I said.
My voice cracked on the word you.
I hated that.
I hated how small I sounded.
Hannah looked at me like she had heard it.
Like she knew.
“I read the pages you sent,” she said. “I read them until the words blurred.”
Then she looked back at Copper.
“I was so angry at her.”
Nobody said anything.
The wind moved through the dry grass.
“I thought she gave me away and built a whole new life without me,” Hannah said. “A nice life. A clean life. A life where I didn’t exist.”
I stared at the ground.
Because part of that was true.
She had built a life with me.
She had packed my lunches.
She had braided my hair before school.
She had watched old movies with me on rainy Sundays.
She had kissed my forehead when I had nightmares.
And all that time, Hannah was out there somewhere, thinking she had been thrown away.
“I don’t know how to feel,” Hannah whispered.
That was the first honest thing anyone had said all day.
Not brave.
