I did not know what it was going to become. I did not have a map for it, just as I had not had a map for the evening fifteen years ago when Carol the social worker had handed me a sleeping three-year-old and a single shared suitcase and I had understood that my life had just changed in ways I could not yet fully see.
What I had then, and what I had now, was the same thing: the next day, and the day after that, and the willingness to show up for both of them without knowing what they would hold.
The front door opened and Dora stuck her head out. “Sarah, do we have vanilla extract? Lyra wants to try a recipe.”
“Cabinet above the stove, second shelf.”
She looked at Edwin, briefly, the look of someone who is recalibrating the geography of her evening to include a new element. “You want tea or anything? We’re making things.”
Edwin looked at her. He looked at her with the specific quality of attention of a father who has not seen his daughter in fifteen years and is looking at a woman where he last saw a child of five, and the looking had everything in it, the absence and the grief and the enormous irreversibility of time, and also something that was not those things, something that was present-tense and alive.
“Tea would be good,” he said. “Thank you.”
Dora disappeared back inside. The door swung behind her. Through the window, I could see the kitchen light, my girls moving around in it, the ordinary miracle of them.
Edwin was quiet beside me. I was quiet beside him. The night was cold and the stars were doing what stars do in October when the air is clear, which is to be extremely numerous and entirely indifferent to human events, which is in its own way a comfort.
We stayed out there a while longer. Then we went inside.
