"At first she wanted to faint as she stared at the new face, smooth and freckled, stitched to her daughter’s pale scalp."

"But when [Carmen] Tarleton started talking in her old familiar voice — 'Can’t you just get in here?' — [her mother] relaxed."

“I said, ‘This is who Carmen is now,’ and it really looked beautiful,” she recalled. “Although it didn’t look anything like her, it was her face.”