
Within Reach
Her sons grew up knowing their mother was alive, a short drive across the city, and that she would not come. She sent poems instead. Heather Smith loved her children; that was never in question, and it never once helped. She could not sit in a room with the people who needed her, and she had learned to make that absence look like grief rather than a decision. What was done to her as a child was unforgivable. What she did with it was understandable, and unforgivable too.






