For months I thought she was simply an employee who had become too involved with my mother.
Then I thought she was the sister who had been hidden from me.
Eventually, I learned she was neither of those things alone.
She was Clara.
My sister.
A woman with her own life, her own grief, her own ambitions, and her own choices.
And perhaps that was the lesson I had missed for most of my life.
Loving people did not mean arranging their world for them.
It meant knowing them well enough to stand beside them while they arranged it themselves.
Mother had tried to teach me that.
Father, in his unfinished way, had tried too.
Clara finally succeeded.
One Tuesday morning, many years after that first revelation, I arrived at our café late.
Clara was already seated.
She looked at her watch.
“You’re seven minutes late.”
“I had a meeting.”
