North Carolina is a recurring point of separation in Tess Henry’s story: her young son lives there with his other grandmother while Tess struggles with addiction and attempts to find treatment. The state enters the narrative less as a developed setting than as the distant home of a child whose absence shapes the lives and hopes of the adults around him.

A Home Far from Tess

By the time Tess’s son was a toddler, he was living with his other grandmother in North Carolina. Tess had not witnessed any of his first steps. The distance made ordinary milestones into losses she could not recover, while her mother, Patricia, made the twelve-hour round trip each month to visit him. She shared pictures of the visits, including the boy playing on the beach and wearing a sock monkey hat.

Patricia’s Visits and Hopes

Patricia’s regular journeys kept a connection with her grandson alive despite the separation from Tess. She showed him family photographs and encouraged him to say “Mama” when she pointed to Tess, holding open the possibility that her daughter could recover and become a loving mother. That hope existed alongside Patricia’s private fear that Tess might die before emerging custody issues could be resolved.

A Place Imagined Through Loss

North Carolina also belongs to Patricia’s thoughts about the possibility of losing Tess. She had chosen a place to scatter her daughter’s ashes at the meeting of the Cape Fear River and the ocean, near the family’s former beach house, where they had walked the dogs and searched for sand dollars. The imagined burial place gives the landscape an intimate family history; it stands in stark contrast to the monthly visits that sustain Patricia’s relationship with her living grandson. North Carolina thus holds both separation and remembrance in Tess’s story, without resolving the uncertain future of her relationship with her son.