She remembered the accusations. The shouting. The way he had looked at her when he decided she no longer deserved to be heard. The way he had turned his back when she needed him most.
Alice forced herself back to the present as they reached the forest. She had never told the girls much about their father—not because she wanted to erase him, but because she refused to poison their hearts with bitterness. When they asked, she only said, “Your father is not with us.”
It was the truth.
By midday, the bundle was ready. Alice tied it across her back and straightened slowly under the familiar burn of its weight. Then she began the long walk back.
That was when the black SUV stopped.
Ila noticed it first. “Mama,” she whispered. “The car…”
Alice lifted her head.
At first, her mind refused to accept what her eyes were seeing.
The man stepping out of the vehicle was tall, sharply dressed, effortless in his authority. His face was older now, stronger, but unmistakable.
The world tilted.
Her fingers tightened around the rope holding the wood. Her breath vanished. For one terrible second, she was nineteen again—young, hopeful, standing before the man who had once promised her the world.
And now he was here.
Behind him came another woman—beautiful, polished, self-assured in a way Alice no longer had the energy to be.
So that was who he had become.
Alice lowered her eyes instinctively, shame rising in her throat like bile. Dust covered her skin. Poverty marked every line of her life. And yet even stronger than humiliation was fear—fear of what this meeting might awaken, fear of what it might cost her daughters, fear that the fragile life she had built through pure will was about to be shaken by the man who had once walked away without looking back.
When she raised her head again, their eyes met.
And she knew that whatever happened next, nothing would ever be the same.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
The road, usually full of noise, seemed to hold its breath.
Nana stood with one hand still on the open car door, suddenly stripped of the confidence that ruled boardrooms and ministries. Alice was thinner than he remembered. Her face, once soft and full, now bore the quiet marks of endurance. Her dress was patched at the elbows and hem. Her scarf was worn nearly threadbare.
And yet she was unmistakably Alice.
The woman who had loved him.
