That is the paradox at the center of my life, the thing I cannot explain to anyone who has not lived something like it: that the hardest thing I have ever done was also, without any competition, the best.

Chapter 4 — Noah

Noah grew into the kind of boy that people smiled at, sweet and curious and open-hearted, with his mother’s bright hazel eyes and the same subtle dimple in his cheek that Chloe had when she was small.

He loved baseball with his whole soul, from the time he was old enough to hold a bat, and he loved Sunday pancakes, and he loved animals and comic books and the particular kind of dinosaur facts that only eight-year-old boys can retain in such quantity.

He was, without any exaggeration, the easiest child to love that I have ever known, not because he was perfect, he was a normal boy with normal trouble in him, but because there was a fundamental sweetness at the center of him, an openness to the world that had somehow survived the sadness that hung over the beginning of his life.