Sara thought the day her mother died had been the single worst of her life. But she was dead wrong. At the memorial service, she discovered she didn’t know her well, maybe not at all. Perhaps no one did. She’d always assumed her flaming red hair with temperament to match came from her Irish ancestors. Sara looked nothing like Soren, who had dark hair and olive skin, or the one photo she’d seen of Sam Burden, who shared her mother’s hair and skin color.

Sara had been told her father died in an accident when she was two: “Sam Burden had no business on that tractor. He was an intellectual, for crying out loud,” her mother had said. Although Sara had no memories of him, she’d fantasized him into being. For instance, she thought she recalled how they would slip away to Miss Nance’s store for salt-water taffy kept in jars beside the cash register. Yet on this particular day, Sara learned that none of it ever happened. Turns out the independent Soren St. James was not just ahead of her time in keeping her maiden name, she never married Sam Burden. He was not around even one day. Sweet old Martha Edge, the wife of the doctor whose tonic kept Soren from a miscarriage, insisted that her mother never saw Sam Burden after she told him that she was pregnant. “So sorry for your loss, dear,” Martha said. Then she patted Sara on the shoulder and said, “Bless your heart.”

Sara wondered if her mother’s sudden death and almost simultaneously learning about her father had been some kind of karmic joke. She didn’t know what hurt worse, losing her mother or learning that the man whose face, whose smile, whose approval she’d sought from earliest childhood had been nothing more than a shadow she chased in her dreams.