Page 194 of Bend

My chest tightens.

“Mom?”

He nods slowly, and there’s a flash of something painful across his face.

“Yeah. Around the mouth. The shape of your face.” His gaze stays on mine. “But your eyes…”

He trails off.

“What about them?”

His throat moves before he answers.

“They look like my mum’s.”

That hits me in a place I wasn’t ready for.

I blink and look down at my coffee because suddenly there’s too much sitting in that one sentence.

A grandmother I never knew. A whole side of myself I’ve never seen reflected anywhere before.

When I look back up, he’s still staring at me.

Not in a way that makes me uncomfortable.

More like he’s trying to understand how something so familiar could have existed without him knowing.

“I wanted to meet you,” I say.

His entire body stills.

“What?”

“I wanted to meet you.”

He looks genuinely shocked now, enough that some of the control drops out of his face.

“You did?”

“Yeah, eventually.”

I rub my thumb along the rim of the mug.

“I wanted to know you. I just wasn’t ready yet.”

His expression shifts again, and this time there’s guilt in it.

Not soft guilt either.

The kind that tightens his jaw.

“I should’ve known.”

I shake my head.

“How?”

He looks away.