In the storage room of the gallery, Jordan pulled the sheet off a canvas, and it was me at twenty-five, in a portrait I had never seen, never sat for, signed and dated 1993.
Greg, Lilys father, stepped forward and said he painted it the year before he left. And then he said he gave it, in 1994, to someone to deliver to me. When I asked who, he said a name I had not heard in thirty years. My own mother.
My mother never gave me that painting. My mother never wanted Greg in my life, and when he and I fell apart, she made sure we stayed apart. She told him I did not want to see him. She told me he had gone without a word. Both of us believed her, because why would a mother lie, and for thirty years I thought Lilys father simply walked out on a three-year-old and never looked back.
He had looked back. He had painted me from memory and tried to send it as a way of saying he was sorry, and the painting sat in my mothers attic until she passed, and then it made its way, through an estate sale and a chain of strangers, to an art student in New Mexico named Lily who recognized her own mothers face in a thrift-store canvas.
That was what Lily found. That was why she tracked down Greg. And that was why she did not want me at the opening until she understood the whole tangled truth herself.
My daughter did not hide me from her art. She was untangling thirty years of a lie before she let me walk into the middle of it.
Greg and I will never be what we were. Too much time, too many years lost to someone elses decision. But we stood in that storage room, two people who had both been told the other did not care, and we let the lie finally die.
Lily hung the portrait in her next show. She titled it with one word. Mother. I gave up a lot of things raising her alone. It turned out I had not given up being seen.