The first holiday season after the airport reunion was more difficult than I expected.

The girls saw families represented in school drawings as tidy groups of two parents and two children.

Ours required extra space on the paper and sometimes a longer explanation.

Hazel asked whether Nathaniel had missed her first birthday because she had been too small for him to see.

I answered that he had not known about her and that grown-ups had made mistakes in sharing important news.

I told her none of it was because of anything she did or failed to do.