Carl described moments from my life that no stranger should have known.
The unsigned birthday cards that arrived every year until I turned eighteen.
The anonymous scholarship that appeared two weeks before I planned to leave college.
The unexpected internship offered by a company to which I did not remember applying.
The rent payment marked “administrative correction” during the winter I lost my first job.
None of them had been coincidences.
Carl had been there all along.
Not beside me. Never close enough to be seen. But always near enough to keep me from falling too far.
A chill moved through me.
My childhood had been filled with unanswered questions. My mother, Evelyn, had disappeared when I was six. My aunt Nora raised me afterward, insisting that Evelyn had been restless, unreliable, and incapable of remaining in one place.
“She loved you in her way,” Nora used to say. “But some people are born with open roads inside them.”
