My younger daughter. She arrived a woman grown, from a future no version of myself will know; I remember her birth, her early childhood, but I, physically, never experienced it.

She is and is not my own; I am and am not the woman who mothered her. If I had not been certain, already, of the truth of those memories, ( a nightmare she might have convinced herself had been no more than that, ) then for her to exist at all would have proven them.

The fade is a thing that is touched, typically, by minds and not hands. We have— dreamed ourselves into being. A path diverged.