“What I wanted to know from my mother was how to reconcile the fact that some people never find love. I am sure I said it that way, find, like a miraculous, unintentional discovery, as if love were a stone in the sand. But to be found also implies that something lost has been returned to its place of belonging, and what did I know about love and stones? I was still holding out for a kind of love that felt like homecoming.”