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to share rights that should have been afforded to all even as she collected those very same men, making them love her until she got bored and tossed them aside. My mother had no respect for any woman who needed a man.
    — EXCERPT FROM My Mother’s Daughter

chapter four
    I dream of snow. White, blinding. When I see Sandy, he stands in the street, snow making the world around him soft, seemingly safe. He extends his hand to me, that smile of his pulling up at one corner. Then the car, swerving back and forth. Just before impact I gasp awake and scream, No.
    *   *   *
    My mother always said I never did anything halfway—not in school, not in life, and clearly not in love. On the night of Sandy’s accident, when he still hadn’t come home at midnight, I called everyone I could think of. No one had heard from him, and I’d had to leave a message on my parents-in-law’s answering machine. I paced the apartment, anxiety trumping all the plausible explanations I managed to come up with. When the phone rang at one in the morning I went still, standing frozen for half a second before I grabbed up the receiver. “Sandy?” I blurted.
    A startled silence followed. “Emily, this is Walter Portman.”
    My father-in-law’s voice was brusque, intimidating. But that night his usual tone was mixed with something else. It wasn’t alarm, as if I would need to come quickly. It was more resignation, as if whatever had happened was done, finished.
    My breath rushed out in a silent gasp. My brain tripped and staggered, then righted itself, though only to the position of drunken soldier not in her right mind. At some level I knew what the call meant. But I didn’t give my father-in-law a chance to tell me. I made small talk, asked how things were at the firm. “Can you believe this bizarre weather?” I bleated.
    I heard him sigh, the sound of his leather desk chair groaning as he leaned back and said, “I’m afraid I have bad news.”
    Grief alters the mind, has the ability to take you places that seem normal but aren’t. “This isn’t a good time, Mr. Portman. Sandy should be home any minute.”
    He was silent then. After a long moment he started again, this time softer. “Emily.”
    But he didn’t get a chance to finish before I heard his wife walk in.
    “Did you tell her?”
    He covered the mouthpiece, his voice muffled as he said something, then Althea came on the line.
    “Emily, there’s been an accident.”
    *   *   *
    I had barely known Sandy for more than a few days when I invited him to dinner at my apartment. I made a meal of lamb chops with a mango curry, and we talked long into the night. His hands were strong and beautiful, always close to mine, but never touching.
    For the next few evenings, he arrived at my apartment after work, and less than a week after I met him he burst through my door. “Honey, I’m home!”
    I laughed before racing back to the kitchen.
    He chuckled and closed the door behind him. My hands returned to the dough I was kneading, and I could see him take in the surroundings. I loved my home. It wasn’t in an important building on the Upper East or Upper West Sides of town. It was a nondescript, medium-rise prewar space east of midtown, but a gem of light and high ceilings. It was on the top of the building, with gardens and a front door painted red. A secret jewel in a city of tiny spaces, filled with photos, flowers, and the first-edition children’s books I had been collecting since I was a child.
    After my mother died, the rent-controlled apartment was the only thing she left me, the one thing I needed the most. I might have driven her crazy with my desire for a permanence she didn’t begin to understand, but without ever telling me, she had put my name on the lease and left me a home.
    After years of butting heads, I vowed that somehow I would find a way to thank my mother. Somehow I would find a way to make her proud.
    “This place is amazing,” Sandy said.
    “It’s