Diane answered the door before I could knock.
She was smaller than I expected — slight, with dark circles under her eyes that spoke of the surgery and the weeks since.
But she held herself straight, and her handshake was firm.
“Come in,” she said.
“He’s in the living room.
I told him a friend of his daddy’s was coming to visit.”
The living room was warm and a little cluttered in the way that children’s spaces always are — a basket of toy cars, a stack of picture books, a drawing taped to the wall that appeared to be either a dog or a very enthusiastic cloud.
Daniel was sitting on the rug with a set of wooden blocks, building something with great concentration.
He looked up when I walked in.
Mark’s eyes.
Mark’s exact eyes — the particular shade of grey-green, the slight downward tilt at the outer corners.
It hit me somewhere behind the sternum.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
“I’m Sarah.”
“I’m Daniel.” He held up the structure he’d been building.
“This is a rocket.”
“It’s a very good rocket.”
He considered this seriously.
“It needs more on top,” he said, and went back to work.
Diane caught my eye from the doorway.
She had seen my face when I first looked at him.
She gave me a small, careful nod.
We sat in the kitchen while Daniel built his rocket and periodically reported on its progress through the doorway.
Diane made coffee.
I had decaf.
We talked for nearly two hours.
She told me about the early years — how she had tried to reach Mark when Daniel was born, how he hadn’t responded, how she had eventually stopped trying.
She said it without bitterness, which I found harder to absorb than bitterness would have been.
“I was angry for a long time,” she said.
“I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t.
But Daniel is the best thing in my life, and I can’t be angry about something that gave me him.”
“That’s very generous.”
“It’s practical,” she said.
“Anger is expensive when you’re doing it alone.”
I thought about that.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“Right now.
Practically.”
She wrapped both hands around her mug.
“I’m back at work in six weeks.
My neighbor has been covering the school pickups, but she can’t do it indefinitely.
