The gap was full. The closing was the agreement to build around it.
They built. Nate drove to Grand Rapids once a month. Sophie drove to us once a month. The cousins met. Emma and Rosie stood beside each other and studied each other’s faces with the particular attention of children who are encountering someone who looks like them and who are deciding whether the resemblance is a coincidence or a kinship.
It was a kinship. The kinship was visible in every feature. The dark hair. The jawline. The eyes. Two little girls carrying the echo of two twins who were separated at three and who were now sitting in adjacent chairs at a kitchen table, watching their daughters discover the connection that biology had maintained across the years their parents could not.
Carol and David attended one of the visits. They sat at Sophie’s kitchen table. Carol held Sophie’s hand the way she had held it during the quarterly visits to Michigan, with the grip of a woman who understood she had one hour to compress the love she should have been distributing daily into the contact of a single afternoon.
