26

“Dear, I didn’t just know your mother. At one time long ago, we were best friends.”

“What?”

Barbara sighed and closed the album, as she seemed to slip off to some faraway time and place that from the look on her face pained her to return to.

“Your mother and I knew each other from the time we were seven and we remained dear friends until the end of my freshman year in college, which was right around the time she met that no good father of yours. I tried to talk her out of dating him, but she wouldn’t listen and eventually we drifted apart. I returned to Bayside right after college, and by then your mother had turned into a person I didn’t even recognize,” she said sadly, and Natalia knew she was speaking of her mother’s addiction to drugs and alcohol that would eventually lead her into a life of prostitution.

She sat there in shocked silence, struggling to wrap her mind around everything as she stared at