because children always know when something important is happening, holding a plastic dinosaur in one hand and a sheet of stickers in the other.
He looked at her with the direct, uncomplicated assessment of a young child evaluating an unfamiliar adult.
Then he walked over and pressed a dinosaur sticker into her palm.
“Do you like green?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good,” he said, and went back down the hallway.
She held the sticker in her palm and looked at Daniel, who was watching his son disappear around the corner with an expression she recognized from somewhere deep in her own history — the expression of a parent who cannot quite believe the person they made.
“I don’t know how to be your son,” he said.
“You already are,” she said.
They stood in the kitchen in the quiet that follows the kind of day that rearranges everything, and she
