My phone vibrated.
A message from Vanessa.
Love you, Mom.
See you Sunday.
I read it twice.
Then I smiled and typed back.
Love you too, sweetheart.
I put the phone away and looked across the water.
For the first time in twenty-eight years, March no longer felt like the month my daughter died.
It felt like the month she came into the world.
And for the first time in nearly thirty years, I didn’t have to purchase someone else’s happiness with pieces of my own.
I thought winning one hundred million dollars would change my life, but the greatest fortune I ever received was discovering that the daughter I’d spent twenty-eight years mourning had been alive all along—and that I still had a lifetime left to love her.
