“My Natasha,” she would say, running her fingers through the girl’s long brown hair with a possessiveness suggesting the strands were an extension of her own. Natasha’s eyes were brown spattered with glimmers of emerald and uncut diamond. Hazel, technically. Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label.
