Chapter 1 — The Happiest Day

It was supposed to be the happiest day of the year.

That was the narrative, at least — the one that had been so carefully written for us, though I did not yet know that someone else was holding the pen.

It was a crisp Saturday afternoon in our quiet, manicured neighborhood in Naperville, and my twelve-year-old twins, Mason and Wyatt, were turning twelve.

I had spent the entire week turning our backyard into a carnival of everything they loved.

Strings of lights wove through the old oak trees.

A playlist of their favorite songs drifted from hidden speakers.

On the patio table sat a massive tiered cake, decorated in the colors of a comic-book franchise the two of them could quote line for line.

Those boys were the center of gravity of my entire life.

Everything I did, every plan I made, every early morning and late night, had been for them, since the day they were born.

I did not have a self that existed apart from being their mother.

I had never wanted one.

People say that as though it were a small thing, a mother living for her children, a sweet and slightly quaint devotion.

It is not small.

It is the largest thing I know.

When Mason and Wyatt were born, two minutes apart, red and furious and impossibly tiny, something in me reorganized itself around them permanently, the way a compass needle swings and settles and afterward always points the same way no matter how you turn it.

From that day, the direction of my life was fixed.

Every choice ran through them.