Turns out her mom, Isabella, had been a close friend of my mom\u2019s back in the day. I couldn\u2019t quite grasp the connection, so she explained it slowly, as if she were piecing together a story both of us had somehow forgotten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe used to live in the same neighborhood, right around the time you were born,\u201d she said, brushing sand off her hands. \u201cBut, well\u2026 things happened. She and my mom fell out, and we lost touch. My mom didn\u2019t talk about it much.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I felt a knot tighten in my stomach. I had never heard my mom mention a Leandra or even a falling out with anyone. Not like that. But the resemblance was uncanny, and I couldn\u2019t shake the feeling that there was something deeper to this encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I found myself asking her all the questions I didn\u2019t even know I had\u2014about her life, about her mom, and why I had never known about her. Leandra answered with honesty but also a slight hesitation, like she didn\u2019t want to stir up old memories or open wounds. I could tell she was holding something back, but for the moment, it didn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Turns out her mom, Isabella, had been a close friend of my mom\u2019s back in the day. I couldn\u2019t quite grasp the connection, so she explained it… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1904,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3653,"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652\/revisions\/3653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodarticles.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}