“My baby,” she sobbed. “My precious little girl. You’re home.”
I wrapped my arms around her.
For a moment, I was forty-nine years old and four years old at the same time.
I was a frightened woman who had arrived at a stranger’s mansion for money.
And I was a little girl who had somehow found her way back to the arms of a grandmother she had forgotten.
Then Margaret began humming.
It was a simple lullaby, an old melody that seemed to rise from somewhere deep inside me.
I knew the tune.
I didn’t know how I knew it, but I knew it.
My lips began moving before I consciously decided to sing.
Margaret’s eyes widened.
“You remember!”
I sang the next line.
She joined me, her voice shaking.
And suddenly, a memory flashed through my mind.
A garden filled with white roses.
A woman laughing as she knelt beside me.